Favorite Database View/OG RE Memory?

Bobby Steurer

With the future sunsetting of Database View on the horizon, I thought it would be fun to ask the Community what your favorite old-school RE memories are. Were you around in the late 80's for the creation of the original product? Were you there when RE7 dropped?

I'll share mine:

It's 2013, and I'm a couple weeks in at my first desk job for a local high school. I get asked a question about a donation that had come in through unknown means, presumably from an outside P2P opportunity. My colleague really wanted to know more about the donor. So, I look at the name:

Falco Lombardy.

"Umm, I'm not sure I can do much on this one," I say. My colleague looked a little puzzled and asked why not.

"Well, I think it's a fake name. Falco Lombardy is a character from the Nintendo 64 game, Star Fox 64."

We never found out who Falco was, and it went to an anonymous record, if I remember right.

Every now and then when I'm very deep into some work that still sort of requires Database View, I think about that time and laugh. Shout out to "Falco." Hoping we can meet one day.

Carlene Johnson

Fun fact: in the original DOS version, queries were actually called Sort/Select instead of Query. I had completely forgotten that until a recent conversation with @Bill Connors .

It also reminded me of my very first job, when I accidentally deleted every Sort/Select in the database while working over a weekend. IT refused to restore from backup (which, let’s be honest, probably meant there was no backup), so the damage was permanent.

It’s why I give every client the same advice: never do major clean‑up projects, global changes, or global deletes at the end of the day when you’re tired and thinking, “I just want to get this one last thing done before the weekend.” That’s exactly when one is distracted, rushed, and most likely to click the wrong button!

Lia Wilson

One of my favorite memories is courtesy of a former co-worker. For a joke, she had added the annotation "I am She-Ra, Princess of Power!" to her record. Of course, she checked the box so it would pop up every time we opened her record. Even after she moved on to a different job, I kept that on her record until a supervisor told me to remove it. To She-Ra, Princess of Power, I know you are on top of your world!

Elaine Tucker

I came on just AFTER the DOS conversion and started in RE6; the online user community was really vested in learning how everything worked :). Similiar to Carlene, it was a Friday afternoon, and I thought I was doing a global add - ahem - well it was a global change on ACTIONS! I spent the entire weekend updating every action (by group - luckily there was additional coding on them to tell them apart).

I also remember the big scramble as we prepped to convert to RE7 - phones were a big issue!