Tuesday, March 17, 2009

DataRage

Thought I would brush off the blog, it has been a long time since I last posted. This is mainly because of the fierce rate of change at Embarcadero this year. Including my new position as CTO. This role brings some new challenges, one of which is helping to drive the technical innovation of our products and portfolio. This implies lots of research and archaeology into how people design, build, run technology. Which means I am interested in knowing where you think the gaps in our tool portfolio are. A tremendous amount of effort has gone into making our portfolio available in the form of All-Access. The benefits of having the whole portfolio (or tool box) at your disposal is amazing and worth some attention. The new All-Access server with it's integration with the licensing server and provisioning really helps in many ways. Three I like are: Usage transparency, easy of deployment, and single application portal.

Even with all the activity related to InstantOn (part of All-Access) the product releases train keeps on moving. Next stop a new version of DB Optimizer to be released this week. The 1.5 release has major changes in appearance, Kyle Hailey and team have done amazing job in bring this product to a new level. There are many new features but the main focus of making it easier to identify and resolve SQL problems is definitely improved upon in this release. This release reflects Kyle's thoughts on ease of use, "life is too difficult already, I don't need more complexity just make it easier". More info on DB Optimizer and other products can be found on the EDN site.

In these tough economic times if it often hard to find budget to attend conferences in person. Today marks the start of DataRage our virtual conference. This is a great way to get lots of information from the comfort of your desk chair. There are a number of On-Demand videos that have been prerecorded for you to view at your leisure. Including one from yours truly. I encourage you to take a look at DataRage and EDN and let us know what you think.