The MultiValue Database

Pick is a Integrated Development Environment for database applications. It was developed by Richard Pick in the 60's, and originally sold with proprietary hardware as an operating system with an embedded database. As such, it included a procedure language (PROC), a high level programming language (DATABASIC) and a retrieval language (RECALL, ENGLISH, ACCESS, etc depending on the vendor). Now it is available to run on basically any platform, in particular MS Windows and Unix. It was always written as a virtual machine, so all the various implementations look very much the same. In fact, this constancy is one of the systems virtues. I am now taking code and data that has been running since the mid 70's on proprietary hardware and moving it to Windows 2000 implementations from a different vendor with only a day or so of work. To the user, it looks just the same - only faster, and of course with more capabilities if you choose to use them.

Those of us who work in this area refer to it simply as 'Pick', short for any Pick-like DBMS. The industry, short of Pick Systems itself (now, Raining Data Corp), has decided to call 'it' the MultiValue DBMS. Consolidation has been rampant in the MultiValue community. Although several of the platforms maintain their original names, the vendors may have changed! The current big sellers are D3 (Raining Data), mvBase (Raining Data), UniVerse (IBM), UniData (IBM), Reality (Northgate) and jBase (Jbase Software) .

Older platforms still in use are: Mentor, Ultimate, Prime, AP (for Advanced Pick) and many others.