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?

PowerSQL

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

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!