I also worked for Cheeseborough-Ponds, helping them integrate their systems management software. I was often sent out to help large clients make their software work. A free copy of Microsoft SQL Server. That must have been very tempting as compared to a solution you did not know. What struck me is how flexible Inmagic is on searches.
Typical databases have keyword values.
With Inmagic databases, you can search on anything, anywhere in the database. Though it is true that you can do any sort of search with any relational database, if you need to search all the data, the typical RDB will perform a sequential search, which is very slow and resource heavy. You ve got poor applications design at this point. What really impressed me about Inmagic is the fact that it works like a marriage of a traditional database and a powerful search engine. All sorts of searches can be done quickly and easily without utilizing lots of processing power.