Value of Work Flow

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

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

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

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?

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!

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?

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?