International Sybase User Group

For those of you that don’t know, I have written several articles for the ISUG Technical Journal.  I’ve been paid for one and refused payment on the others.  Are there other authors that haven’t been paid for one reason or another?

This is not meant as a dig at ISUG but simply determining if I’m the only one or if there are others.

Years ago PowerBuilder was king.  No one could touch it.  It was relatively inexpensive.  Microsoft’s Visual Basic matured and the Pascal based Borland’s Delphi was released.  Then it fell and fall it did.

Sybase

As it was falling from the throne Sybase purchased Powersoft, makers of PowerBuilder.  As the the market share continued to shrink, PowerBuilder developers had more difficulty in finding new projects.  Most new development was written in Visual Basic or Java.

Years went by with marketing of PowerBuilder little more than the occasional road show, TechWave presentations and the ISUG Technical Journal ads catered towards existing customers.  Little to no effort was put forth by Sybase to gain new PowerBuilder customers.

During this week’s Sybase TechWave, PowerBuilder version 12 was released.  It has all the whistles and kitchen sinks you could ask for.   An amazing tool for development!  Too bad no one outside of the die hard PowerBuilder programmers will use it.

Blasphemy!  Heretic!

Consider this:

Sybase owns PowerBuilder.  It owns the PowerBuilder software, PowerBuilder language, PowerScript, the PowerBuilder vm, and everything PowerBuilder.

No problem right?

What will happen to PowerBuilder when Sybase is bought out by another company?  Products with tiny market share like PowerBuilder would likely be killed or in a state of limbo for several years.  Anyone remember what happened when IBM bought Informix?

Do you really want to bet your career and business on a software development tool that is locked to a single smallish vendor?

Maybe, perhaps, if Sybase were to release the PowerBuilder 4GL language and PowerScript to the world like Microsoft did with the C# and Visual Basic languages and Sun with Java…   Perhaps if Sybase would allow 3rd parties to develop tools based around the PowerBuilder language royalty free…

Sybase:  PLEASE FREE THE POWERBUILDER 4GL LANGUAGE!

I mean, really, what benefit could Sybase have to cripple the PowerBuilder developers?

Ultimately, the publication of the article was my fault.  So please, just ignore my article in the Jan/Feb 2009 issue of the ISUG Technical Journal.

International Sybase User Group

Over on ISUG‘s SIG-ASE mailing list, Peter Thawley wrote up the following reply that I think everyone using Sybase ASE and is thinking of using a RAM disk should be aware of.  When I asked Peter if I could repost his message on my blog he agreed

Creating a RAM Disk

Peter Thawley

Joe and Shane are spot-on about a task context switching off the engine on an i/o to a RAM-disk based device … and yes Joe, there is nothing you can do about this right now. Normally, one would think of this as a good thing … and it is for that specific user since they get to consume more cpu/engine time thereby getting better response time for their request.

Now, to throw a wrench into this! In these cases where some or all of the database is cached, one does have to be aware of the potential for other user tasks to experience some amount of starvation. Image a bunch of tasks, each consuming a full time slice (100ms by default) before yielding. For systems doing pure OLTP (short) transactions with users getting on an engine and getting off reasonably quickly … little risk of a problem. For mixed workload applications with some OLTP and some DSS/reporting, the potential for starvation is quite real and nearly guaranteed for environments with fully cached DBs. I’ve seen some trading systems in tier 1 investment banks brought to their knees by an innocent IT person deciding to buy a lot of memory to cache the entire DB only to wonder why performance started going to hell. [Of course, it was Sybase's fault ... ( - ; )]

In these cases, be thinking about execution classes/engine groups to segregate OLTP and DSS users onto their own disjoint set of engines using dynamic listeners to keep execution engines and network engines aligned within the same engine groups. You may also want to consider reducing “clock tick length” to keep a timeslice period lower than 100ms … I’ve seen some sites successfully using 50ms and even less … there seems to be little downside since most systems do the async disk io and net io checks a lot more frequently than 100 ms due to the “io polling process count” param.

Just trying to present a balanced view here …. This is going to be important for more people to consider as in-memory database techniques and/or features / products become more prevalent.

Peter
_____________________________________

Peter Thawley
Senior Director / Architect
CTO Group, WMO
Sybase, Inc.

It’s coming…

48 hours from now something big is coming!

An Informatica product manager Informed me they were considering dropping support for ASE as a repository. Please contact me if you run Informatica and have ASE as a repository.

Joe Buhl
BT Conferencing
joe.buhl@bt.com

I can only hope that the product manager was either misinformed or that Informatica can be convinced to retain support for Sybase ASE as a repository.

Adrian Bridgwater

Migration migraines: the top seven DBA data headaches

Posted by Adrian Bridgwater

Once or twice a year I get to work with an excellent DBA pal from Illinois called Jason Froebe who describes himself as a, “Perlmonger capable of speaking fluent munchkin.” His personal blog is called Ramblings of a Geek, but I keep telling him he should rename it “Froebe’s Frontal Lobe”.

read more at ZDnet…

The work that Adrian mentions is a last minute article for the International Sybase User’s Group that I wrote and he edited.  The benchmarking article that many people are waiting for is being held up by several groups giving their approval for the release of the material.

As always, it is a real pleasure to work with Adrian

This issue contains:

• Sybase IQ and Sybase WorkSpace Part II By Mike Crocker
• Perl in the shell By Jason Froebe
• Taming the process nightmare: Consolidating a Horde of Process Diagrams with PowerDesigner By Mike Nicewarner
• Information overload: Weapons-grade data analysis comes of age By Teresa Foster
• Maximizing PowerBuilder and SQLAnywhere Part III SQLAnywhere, a PowerBuilder Developer’s perspective
  By Chris Pollach
• select random (stuff) from SYBASE Command shell by proxy By Bill Grant
• Mobile Enterprise Everywhere: Taking Sybase on the road By Adrian Bridgwater
• Sybase TechWave 2008: Time for the technology tsunami

You need to be an ISUG member to receive the ISUG Technical Journal.  Join ISUG today!

International Sybase User Group

From the official announcement:

A video featuring an intrepid corporate reporter and her real-time hunt for her on-the-move CEO was the winner of the Sybase “How We Did It” Video Challenge.

“Finding Jono,” created by Anne Walker of St George Bank, Treasury & Valorem Systems Australia, follows Walker from Valorem Systems headquarters to the local mall and ultimately the mall parking garage in her quest to find CEO Jon Tinberg. She is able to track his movements thanks to a company system featuring such Sybase solutions as ASE, PowerBuilder, PocketBuilder and MobiLink synchronization technology.

Attendees of TechWave 2008 selected “Finding Jono” as the winner of the challenge after viewing it and other video submissions over the course of the conference week and voting via text message. Walker won the top prize of $5,000 for the submission.

Second-place winner in the contest was “Desktop Widget,” produced by Team Sybase’s Bruce Armstrong. The second-place ranking earned Armstrong a Flip Mino compact video camera.

Contest voters rated the videos based on originality, creativity and how well the video showcased the company’s innovative use of Sybase software to solve a real-world challenge.

Sybase extends its congratulations to the winners.

Go to Sybase TechWave 2008 Flickr group

Jason L. Froebe, TeamSybase, ISUG Board Member, and MyDatabases magazine publisher, demonstrates the Tim Tam Slam: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_tam_slam

YMCA

Living on a Prayer

The Lion Sleeps Tonight (part 1)

The Lion Sleeps Tonight (part 2)

Love Shack

??? and Christine Weber

Mack the Knife

Thunder Road

Eric Van Patten and Millard F. Brown III

Copacabana

Nina Hunter

Material Girl

(left to right) Christine Weber, Katherine Soong, and Nina Hunter. A surprise appearance by Phil Bowermaster!

Come Together

Phil Bowermaster

Dear ISUG Member,

ISUG is pleased to announce that the special TechWave issue of the ISUG Technical Journal is now available.  Green and Gold members can access the issue online at http://my.isug.com/p/do/sd/sid=1308&type=0 (Gold members will also receive the printed copy within the next 2-4 weeks.)

Basic and Associate Members can see an abstract of the issue, containing the first page of each article at http://my.isug.com/p/do/sd/sid=1311&type=0 — if you like what you see and want to read more, simply upgrade your membership today and you can read the full online version!

Plus!  Green and Gold members can now also view the Journal using the iViewer technology from PCS. Simply goto www.isug.com/iViewer (login using your my.isug.com account if requested) and you’ll be on your way!

Regards,

Bryan Enochs
President, ISUG

If you’re not a member of ISUG, please join today or at Sybase’s TechWave, in Las Vegas, to gain access to the ISUG Technical Journal

International Sybase User Group

3347 Allow for load with no_data into a smaller database
3090 Maintenance user update only for replicate database in warm standby.
3351 Add suid argument to sp_addlogin
3053 Allow for dropping of an audit table
3257 Change MDA datatypes to unsigned 2/4/8 byte integer

International Sybase Users Group

s
3252 J2EE connector for ASE
3125 grantable create/drop index
3092 Getting stats about the total amount of log generated by a query
3057 sp_add_resource_limit works now for the datasegment for tempdb, extends also for the log segment
3277 The MDA table monSysStatement PagesModified volumn is always 0
3088 Extract SQL statements from ASE log
3099 Provide a “zero-fill” function – or more generic “fill” function
3118 Concurrency issue
3133 Allow computed columns to be defined in terms of another computed column(s)
2452 Allow ASE Replicator login to be aliased to ‘dbo’.
3355 # tables / Stored Procedures managment
3273 add support for CURRENT_TIMESTAMP and CURRENT_USER ANSI standard features
3228 sp_dboption ‘no auditing’
3354 Stored Procedure Complilation
3286 Allow UDF to reference another UDF which hasn’t been created yet.
3323 Introduce array structures (varying arrays) and user-defined object datatypes
3234 generic function/procedure parameters
3325 Ability to store and extract sql for jTDS stored procedures
3453 Collect MDA stats at the stored procedure level
3376 Implement ANSI SQL-99 “WITH clause” in SELECT statement
3408 Allow creation of stored procs refereencing #tables when #tables don’t exist
3416 Handle ‘LIKE’ as effectively as ‘=’ when no pattern matching performed
3404 force load
3434 Less restrictive login name rules
3417 LDAP – Allow authentication to multiple domains on a per account basis
3377 Add windowing analytic clause in aggregates for complex calculations
3331 Enforce ANSI limitations on GROUP BY
3345 Allow output of ASE 15 optmizer diagnostics to client without DBCC TRACEON(3604)
3429 Release ASE for MAC OSX Intel
3449 Add CREATE [TEMPORARY] SEQUENCE to T-SQL
3375 Add GREATEST() and LEAST() built-in list functions
3450 Allow builtins/UDFs as arguments to SPs/UDFs
2067 Sybase Engineering’s Proposed CR #270078
3440 Implement Multiversion Consistency/Concurrency Control (MVCC)
3419 Support compiler directives in T-SQL procedures/functions
3403 New Feature Request to handle Money format for Indian Currency(Fetaure Request 447294)

Jeff hits the nail on the head.  You have a voice with the ISUG enhancements process. Use it.  And yes, you have to be paid member to vote. Sorry, but we are a non-profit and your membership fees keep us running!  You can vote as a Basic Member – you do not need to join at the higher membership levels (but you should so you can read all the wonderful articles Jeff writes for us).  The more votes, the easier it is for engineering to justify spending staff resources on it when they go to management.  Encourage all of your peers to join and vote as well.  If you work for a business with several Sybase users, convince your boss to pay for a corporate membership and get all your colleagues to vote as well.

Regards,

Mike Harrold
Executive Director

and

Having an “internal enhancement” (aka a CR) doesn’t mean it gets implemented.  It means there’s a CR for it.  It might be a great idea, but without backing (and a user request + an engineer doesn’t mean it has backing; look how long it took for UDFs, mathematical functions, etc.) it doesn’t get allocated any development resources.  Without development resources, it doesn’t get implemented.

Bottom line, a CR doesn’t mean it’s a “planned” feature.

Regards,

Mike Harrold
Executive Director
International Sybase User Group

I would recommend voting for the ISUG enhancements (this week).  I and several other ISUG Board members will be going through the ISUG enhancements this weekend to present a subset to Sybase product management at TechWave next month.

I haven’t seen many ISUG enhancements being requested lately or voted upon for that matter.  The higher the votes for a particular enhancement, the more likely Sybase will pick it up.

So please, everyone go vote on the ISUG enhancements!

Computer Weekly IT Blog Award -> Programming and technical blogs -> Adrian Bridgwater: Software application development

ZDNet’s biography of Adrian:

Adrian Bridgwater a freelance journalist specialising in cross platform software application development as well as all related aspects of software engineering and project management.

Adrian is a regular blogger with ZDNet.co.uk covering the application development

landscape and the movers, shakers and start-ups that make the industry the vibrant place that it is.

His journalistic creed is to bring forward-thinking, impartial, technology editorial to a professional (and hobbyist) software audience around the world. His mission is to objectively inform, educate and challenge – and through this champion better coding capabilities and ultimately better software engineering.

Adrian has worked as a freelance technology journalist and public relations consultant for over fifteen years. His work has been published in various international publications including the Wall Street Journal, The Register, BBC World Service magazines, the UAE’s Khaleej Times and SYS-CON’s Web Developer’s Journal. He has worked as technology editor for international travel & retail magazines and also produced annual technology industry review features for UK-based publishers ISC.

In previous commercially focused roles, Adrian directed publicity work for clients including IBM, Microsoft, Compaq, Intel, Motorola, Computer Associates, Ascom, Infonet and RIM. Adrian has also conducted media training and consultancy programmes for companies including Sony-Ericsson, IBM, RIM and Kingston Technology.

He is also a published travel writer and has lived and worked abroad for 10 years in Tanzania, Australia, the United Arab Emirates, Italy and the United States.

Please go cast a vote for our Adrian!

All in all, I’ve had a better weekend than Jeff Simmermon over at andiamnotlying.com – pouring espresso on ice is a bad thing according to some coffee shops.  *shakes head*

It would allow us to do things like pgTAP with ease..  Check out the slides for pgTAP

just my opinion… grrrr

I’ve created ISUG enhancement request # 3449 for this.

Dear ISUG Member,

Don’t forget that June 30th is the last date to vote for the annual ISUG
Technical Journal Awards that will be presented at TechWave in Las
Vegas:

http://my.isug.com/p/su/rd/sid=31

Also, June 30th is the last day to renew your membership at the current pricing if you are an individual member:

http://my.isug.com/register.php?renew=1

Don’t forget to select your local or regional user group when you renew!

Regards,

Mike Harrold
Executive Director
International Sybase User Group
Email: Mike.Harrold@isug.com
Support your local Sybase Community
Join today at http://my.isug.com/join

Wouldn’t you want to be like Rob Verschoor and win an ISUG Technical Journal Award?  Did you know anyone can write an article for the International Sybase Users’ Group Technical Journal?  Do you think you can take his next award from him?  Do you have what it takes?!? 

Submit your article TODAY!