Innovation Day

DataRage

2009-03-17T08:02:00.000-07:00

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.

Let the count down being

2008-12-03T04:08:00.000-08:00

I am currently live from Iasi, Romania where I eagerly await the signal that we are ready to launch the DBArtisan 8.6.0 RTM. I will of course make the product available immediately on the beta site the rest will have to wait for the official GA. For those that are not familiar with our terms RTM meaning Release To Manufacturing is the point at which R&D releases the product to the rest of the company at which point is transferred to web site any additional marketting colateral is produced proceeding general availablity. If you can't wait to get a taste please feel free to join the beta site at http://beta.embarcadero.com. Thanks again to everyone that participated in the beta, keep your fingers crossed.

DBArtisan Beta

2008-10-29T15:41:00.000-07:00

The reason I haven't been very active on my blog is because I have been busy working on the DBArtisan 8.6 Beta. This release is different from previous releases in a lot of way, probably most noticeably is the DBArtisan 8.6 Beta doesn't have a major new feature, rather the theme is about improving feature quality and bunch of small features that just make life better. For instance one feature I absolutely love is introduction of check boxes. Gone are the annoying true/false selection. Anyhow there are piles of new things including support for new database versions like Sybase Cluster, SQL Server 2008, Oracle 11g, DB2 9.5, migration improvements and host of improvements. Plus for the first time we are using some new beta software so you can read more about all the new improvements at beta.embarcadero.com. This site is also going to allow you to communicate with each other on just how great this beta is or log and track your issues online. The cool thing about the beta site is we have surveys so you can help guide us as to when this is ready to ship.

Please join the DBArtisan 8.6 Beta now and be part of the action.

Value of Work Flow

2008-10-27T14:27:00.000-07:00

These days it is hard to attract people to your software based on appearance. That isn't to say that appearance isn't important or that people won't make decisions based on appearance. However it is hard to convince someone to try a piece of software if your claims are about appearance, usability, work flow, etc. This is because these terms have been so often misused and everyone will indicate they have superior user experience. The reason I bring this up is I was playing around with the new Change Manager 5.0.1 release and was doing a comparisons so that I could determine the permission difference on a set of tables. Well it didn't work right away. Fortunately I quickly noticed that "Ignore Object Permissions" was selected in the Options selection. After deselecting and re-executing I got the desired result. While I was marvelling over how useful knowing how permissions have changed and how easy it was for me to resolve my issue it dawned on me how little I notice the rest of the setup. From narrowing to tables, though the mapping to finally seeing the result a lot of very exacting refinements were done without really having to think about it. The tool guiding me through a very complex task to results I wanted to see. Anyhow the net result was me thinking, wow that is a great experience we should be telling people about. So as I was seeing the "Great User Experience" headline I signed and realized that would never work. So how do you promote something like work flow?

A Patch for Performance

2008-09-08T14:27:00.000-07:00

DBArtisan 8.5.5 is out. This patch is great step for quality. We corrected over 125 customer issues ( and many more internally reported ). Plus we put a ton of effort into improving the performance of our new object management system. In fact I am going to list off the objects that we have worked on improving the performance of.

On Oracle: Table, Columns, Indexes, Materialized Views, Materialized View Logs, Privileges, Unique Key, Primary Key, Rollback Segment, Cluster, Packages and Package Bodies, Types and Type Bodies, Views, Procedures, Functions, Triggers

On ASE: Table, Column, Primary Keys, Unique Keys, Check Constraints, Indexes, Procedures, Functions, Views, Foreign Keys, Triggers

On SQL Server: Tables, Indexes, Foreign Keys, Procedures, Functions, Triggers, Views, Primary Keys, Unique Key

On DB2: Tables, Views, Primary Keys, Unique Keys

We are always listening to customers and always want to create the best tool for the job. This patch is just a small response to that but certainly contains enough performance improvements to justify a look. Enjoy! More great improvements soon to come.

Sliding back in time

2008-09-04T14:36:00.000-07:00

Isn't August supposed to be the down month? Everyone is on vacation? Well not for this guy. Apparently a few people decided it was change jobs month. I have never been one to shy away from change so I am excited about new beginning but filling the voids has been fun but exhausting. For one I am currently guiding the DBArtisan and Rapid SQL teams personally. These are great teams and they are anxious to put out great product. As such the team has rewarded the world and me with DBArtisan 8.5.5 which should be on the website tomorrow, and I will blog more about then.

Anyhow with all these distractions I haven't had a chance to blog about Performance Center 2.5. The first thing you will notice is it has that new car smell. Er it looks new all over. Some might say the move to 2.5 is like going from VW to a BMW. Marketing has done a great job on detailing the benefits of Performance Center so I won't repeat that. However when you start the Performance Center UI find the Zoom slider and "Current" button on the toolbar.

These two controls do amazing things that were not possible in previous versions. The Zoom actually lets you move around in the last few hours of activity. The graphs will all reflect this change. Clicking current lets you go back to any point in time and the information on the screens adjust to that time. So if someone asks you what was happening last night at 2am when my batch failed, then you can quickly check it out. You can then zoom around to see what lead up to problem as well. Possibilities are endless and if database performance awareness is important to you then this is a good time to test drive this tool.

blaugustFEST

2008-08-06T05:33:00.000-07:00

Looks as though Kenn has already broken the news regarding Blaugust, of course derived from the lunar calendar for when blogging is most frequent and happens to be contained within the month of August. In other words a cheeky attempt to increase the amount of blogging we do.

There are many topics I want to discuss this month. One of the things that we are interest is the topic of DB2 on zOS. We have long supported zOS in DBArtisan are about to spec out some work for the latest versions of zOS. I have always viewed our tool for zOS as way to empower users familiar with database object management on distributed systems to get work done. How many people are out there in this camp? If you have a demand for rich UI experience involving the zOS, what would you expect the tool to do? Let me know what you think.

What are you waiting for?

2008-07-15T07:02:00.000-07:00

DB Optimizer 1.0 released today, a major step reaffirming our attention on database performance related issue. Plus yet another product built on Eclipse.

It is hard to believe there is so much power behind something this beautiful. The team has really delivered some great workflow as well. All this adds up to very nice user experience. Give it a try, you will find that there are many ways to partition the performance information that is being presented and find root areas where tuning can be provided. However I personally like to look at the SQL with the greatest number of executions which by the way is conveniently summed by applying some sophisticated predicate analyst and then let the tools automatic tuning capability tell me how to make it faster. It is so easy you quickly forget how hard it was to do that before this tool. Try it for yourself and let me know what you think.

Also I would like welcome all the Embarcaderian visitors to Toronto this week. We have a lot of internal training going on this week which includes some exciting hands on workshops on Wednesday. I suspect a lot of these workshops will be showing up on the web in blog format in blaugust. More on that later.

Happy Canada Day!

2008-07-01T09:43:00.000-07:00

Once upon a time, before negotiations and deals I was asked a simple question "what do you think about CodeGear joining Embarcadero?". My gut reaction was "that would be awesome!". Being a long time developer and user of several of their tools might have had some to do with that, however I really did believe there was a natural synergy between the two tool sets and great opportunity for us to build on. Nothing has changed from that original thought, well except one thing, it is finally real. That may sound silly but from the moment I started researching CodeGear and started cooking up ideas on what it all meant was moment I was introduced to "this may not happen". I am sure no one is more elated that this is finally done then Borland and CodeGear, but I do share in that joy. This move will have tremendous effect on our business which will ultimately result in amazing benefit to our customers. I am very excited to be part of the next chapter in Embarcadero and today as I celebrate the birth my nation, I also celebrate the birth of the new Embarcadero.

Is anything happening in Q3?

2008-05-07T18:40:00.000-07:00

By now I hope you have heard about our deal with CodeGear. These events have a way of making for crazy days, if not the crazy months leading up to this. I am super pumped about the outcome and if you aren’t familiar with CodeGear tools, then you need to check them out. It doesn’t take long before you start seeing the complementary mix of functionality. Thankfully both companies have some software packages that are based on Eclipse. One of the beautiful things about Eclipse is it makes it easy to combine a bunch of plug-ins to offer more functionality. This will lead to some interesting bundles between those products in a short period of time. Other bundles will be less exotic in the short term but still interesting. Which is great because we don’t have anything else happening in Q3, oh wait… we have six product releases and two new product launches. At least no one can fault us for not liking challenges. Bring on Q3, should be fun.
My mind is swimming with ideas, what two products or functionality would you combine to make an interesting result?

PowerSQL

2008-02-19T19:41:00.000-08:00

Don’t be the last person on the planet to download the PowerSQL beta at http://www.embarcadero.com/powersqlbeta/ . I am very excited about this product I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has been involved in making this project a success past and present. A lot of people have left their signatures in the components of this tool. Ultimately it was unbelievable efforts of the current team that has resulted in the product you see today. And what a product it is, there are so many cool features in this product I don’t know where to start. I am going to narrow in on one hard to find feature but heavily requested in our current product line.

SQL Filters can be found by selecting a Data Source, right click Properties and choosing SQL Filters. Or by Windows->Preferences… and choosing SQL Development, SQL Filters. From either place it is fairly simple to add whatever filters you want. You can even make use of like and in operators. These filters are then applied to the SQL used to retrieve data from the data dictionary thus reducing the cost of retrieving information from the server. Don’t be fooled by client side filters that are still network intensive. SQL Filters is a major plus for people working with robust database environments. Honestly if that is even remotely cool to you then you have to check this product out.

As you can see from my links I am going to EclipseCon in March. Incidentally there will be a big PowerSQL announcement then… wonder what that will be? Anyhow if you are going to be at EclipseCon look out for me, would love to meet a single person who has read my blog. Look for the guy with the blackberry… on second thought look at my picture on this blog. Going to EclipseCon and PowerSQL remind me of a late friend. I first brought the PowerSQL then know as the Talon project to Eclipse World back in 05 and showed it to some Eclipse folks with the Product Manager at the time David Ross. Although his stay on PowerSQL was brief he too left a bit of himself in this product, we miss you Dave.

New Beginnings

2008-02-09T11:15:00.000-08:00

I have been reading blogs for some time and recently realized I was starting to encourage others however had never done it myself. As one who often cares about consistency and fluid approach it seems almost hypocritical not to start blogging, so viola the virgin post. Fortunately I have never been shy about sharing my opinions, but enough about that since I am probably the only who cares.

In my current role at Embarcadero I spend a lot of time debating feature sets and functionality we would like to pour into our products in order to appeal to people whom work with databases. Luckily I don't have to make those decisions on my own. I have host of people with the Program Management (PGM) title telling what they think and making decisions. But bigger then that is the willingness of our customers to share opinions and ideas regarding our products. Probably the pinnacle of this is a two day marathon of ideas shared among customers whom belong to our Product Advisory Committee that concluded last week. I know this event as the PAC meetings or in some cases just the PAC.

The PAC was incredible this year, the amount of information I collected left me truly exhausted. This was the first time I got to spend time with customers who represented everything in our defined life cycle of Design, Develop, Manage all at the same time. I would like to share some of the information I received.

MySQL is growing in popularity in larger organization looking to cut costs.
Real time feedback is really cool
Data replication is huge
Any kind of feedback that improves the quality of the SQL created is really cool
A little heads up if the table is replicated or big before making a change would be nice
Our products are more than just tools, they are work flow which affect how people work and think
Find a good way to share new feature information so that people know new feature is there

Phew, what a list. Ok there was a lot more stuff that I will share another time. Thankfully we have some new tools planned that might help us with some of these points. One of which will be introduced very soon. More on that later. The last point was of particular interest to me. As such I would like to share a new feature that isn't easy to find in our latest versions of DBArtisan and Rapid SQL. I have only ever know this feature as extraction tags. By inserting ETStart or ETEnd into the comment of a procedure creation text will result in the text being put before or after the procedure DDL allowing for some pre and post complation commands. The best example is the use of a temp table with in a procdure.

CREATE PROCEDURE foo
AS
-- CREATE TABLE #temp_table ( col1 int )
-- DROP TABLE #temp_table
select col1 from #temp_table
go

The above text would not execute on it's own. However if this were extracted in DBArtisan or Rapid SQL, the text would look like this:

CREATE TABLE #temp_table ( col1 int )
go
CREATE PROCEDURE foo
AS
-- CREATE TABLE #temp_table ( col1 int )
-- DROP TABLE #temp_table
select col1 from #temp_table
go
DROP TABLE #temp_table
go

which would compile, pretty cool. There are plenty of other uses for such a feature.

If you are a customer of Embarcadero and are interested in the PAC please contact your sales representative or contact me directly via email.

First blog ever finished!