Officially, the Yardi DOS-based applications are only provided and supported on Btrieve 6.15. On 11/21/2005, we spoke with David in technical support at Yardi (in Toronto) who informed us that the application should run on ANY version of the Pervasive database, as long as it supports the Btrieve calls. He indicated that he had no problem with users running on Pervasive.SQL V8.0, but urged that the end user downloaded the 30-day trial and tested the software on a COPY of the database before purchasing and installing. He also had these comments:

• Yardi will ONLY provide support for the database versions that came with the software, i.e. Btrieve 6.15 or Pervasive.SQL V7 or Pervasive.SQL 2000i. As such, they may not be able to read files generated by Pervasive.SQL V8 or PSQLv9 if you should ever need to send your database to them for support. There are two ways to address this: 1) Configure the database engine to create files in the Btrieve 6.x format (and forgo one of the great speed benefits of the Pervasive.SQL engine), or 2) If you do ever need to send you files to Yardi for support, they'll need to be down-converted with the Rebuild Utility to the V6 format. Of course, you should also weigh this with the number of times that you've needed to send files to Yardi for support in the past.
• If the customer decides to upgrade the database version and then has ANY database-related problem, Yardi will not support this issue and may recommend that the user contact Pervasive Software or some other support agency.
• Yardi doesn't want you running this old software any more anyway -- they want you running one of their newer versions. They are unsure exactly how long they will support this old release and urge you to bite the bullet now and get off of the old software.

Based on these issues, each site will need to make their own decision and perform their own testing of the application. Goldstar Software will be happy to help in any way we can with this process! We *do* have customers currently running on Pervasive.SQL V8.7 and Pervasive PSQL v9.1 successfully, and we'll be happy to help you get upgraded as well.

*The abbreviations used on the columns above include the Workstation Engine (WSE), Workgroup Engine (WGE), and Client/Server Engine (CSE). Not all engines exist in all versions, and these are marked with N/A. Items with a NO are unsupported; items with YES are supported. Items with NR are not recommended; items with R are recommended. Items with no entry are unknown at this time. P indicates that testing is in progress for this release.

Important Note: We WERE able to get the older YARDI application running on Pervasive.SQL V8.5 for a customer. The secret is to first install the new engine, then clean up the older 6.x components. You will then receive an error that Yardi does not support running on this database version. You must then set up the registry to force the requester version information to Btrieve 6.15 for the two applications Y.EXE and UTIL.EXE. Windows 98 users may need to do the same for KERNEL32.DLL. PSQLv9 users will also need to rebuild any older Btrieve 5.x files (to 6.x or newer) prior to accessing the system.

Important Note Regarding Purge/Rebuild: The Yardi application has a known flaw with the purge/rebuild functionality which causes computers to completely fail if this process is interrupted in the slightest way. (Yes, this sounds very odd, but is very true -- even clicking on another application can cause an irreversible hang.) When running these processes, you should disable your screen saver, your computer's hibernation/sleep settings, and Monitor-off settings. You should also disable anything that may contain a "pop-up", such as web browsers, instant messaging clients, and the like. Once the process is started, you should NOT touch the system in any way until it completes.

Need more help? If you run into an application problem and Yardi is not able or willing to help you, then there is still hope. Contact Robert Fenney of FenTek Systems, Inc. for more help. He can be reached by phone at 818-752-1730, and has great knowledge of working around "issues" in Yardi.

If you are a software vendor and would like to add, remove, or modify your information on these pages, we'll be happy to oblige. Simply contact us directly!