Microsoft Announces Release Candidate of SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition for Embedded Market; CTP of SQL Server 2005 SP2
Just in time for the 2006 PASS Community Summit in Seattle this week, Microsoft has announced the release candidate of Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Compact Edition, with release to manufacturing expected by the end of this year, as well as the CTP of SQL Server 2005 SP2. "SQL Server Compact Edition is a highly compact but capable relational database that is ideal for embedding in desktop applications or mobile devices that are running applications," Carol Dullmeyer, group marketing manager, SQL Server, told 5 Minute Briefing. "It is very compact and yet it has the same underlying manageability, reliability and security that the rest of the SQL Server family offers as well. In this combination, it is really the first offering that we have made available that is uniquely tailored for the embedded market."
Previously named SQL Server Everywhere Edition, the product has been renamed Compact Edition. "Surprisingly, customers loved the technology but didn't care for the name. It will be changed when we make it generally available by year end." Application developers and ISVs can embed SQL Server Compact Edition in their application by using Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 and the Microsoft .NET framework (or the .NET Compact Framework for device platforms). When the application is deployed to the device, SQL Server Compact Edition is deployed automatically.
SQL Server Compact Edition makes the synchronization capabilities available built-in "so developers don't have to custom code and address all the capabilities required to make that happen seamlessly in the background," said Dullmeyer. Most importantly, Dullmeyer said, the Compact Edition is free to redistribute and deploy.
Microsoft also announced the CTP of SQL Server 2005 SP2, as well as a number of other product updates and enhancements, including the release to manufacturing of Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 and the availability of Visual Studio 2005 extensions for the .NET Framework. The CTP of SP2 offers performance updates and new functionality, including support for Windows Vista. It also features Oracle support in Report Builder, allowing use of Report Builder on top of Oracle data sources. There is also Hyperion support with SSRS, so organizations can use SSRS to build reports on top of Hyperion Essbase cubes. SQL Server SP2 will ship shortly after the launch of Windows Vista and Office, said the company. For more on these announcements, go here. http://www.microsoft.com The release candidate of SQL Server Compact Edition is available via download here.
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InterSystems CACHÉ 2007 Debuts
InterSystems Corp., developer of database and integration software, has announced the immediate availability of CACHÉ 2007, the new version of its post-relational database for rapid Web application development. "We have always focused on rapid application development," Paul Grabscheid, vice president of strategic planning at InterSystems, told 5 Minute Briefing during a private sit-down interview. "Whatever we can do to help developers build richer applications - easier and more quickly - that is going to be our focus."
CACHÉ 2007 introduces two significant new technology components called Zen and Jalapeño. Zen is a development framework - with a library of components (grids, tables, selection trees, etc.) - for building rich, platform-independent Internet applications. With Zen, developers can extend pre-built components or, if preferred, utilize totally new code developed in-house. Zen utilizes a "shared object" client/server data model that eliminates the need for XML parsing. "This is a novel way of sharing data between the server and the client," Grabscheid explained. "Other AJAX technologies just send XML back and forth," he said. "We share the objects between the client and server. This really enhances the interactivity."
Jalapeño is a new software component designed to persist Java objects while eliminating object-relational mapping. This technology derives CACHÉ classes from plain old Java object definitions, and automatically handles persistence methods at run time. Developers can take advantage of optimized direct database access to CACHÉ. "Jalapeño is the right tool for any organization that wants to maximize the productivity of Java developers," Grabscheid remarked. CACHÉ 2007 is available on Windows, Linux, Mac, Unix an OpenVMS platforms. For more information on CACHÉ 2007, click here.
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GoldenGate 9.0 Released with Support for Microsoft SQL Server and IBM DB2 z/OS
GoldenGate Software, a provider of transactional data management solutions, yesterday announced the general availability of GoldenGate 9.0, extending the platform's heterogeneous database capabilities with support for Microsoft SQL Server and IBM DB2 z/OS. "The ability to move across hardware and software, operating systems and databases, is critical for today's businesses," Sami Akbay, vice president of marketing at GoldenGate, told 5 Minute Briefing.
Moreover, Akbay added "Real-time availability is essential here. Downtime is not an option." Recently, a survey conducted by Unisphere Research, the research unit of 5 Minute Briefing, in collaboration with the Professional Association for SQL Server and sponsored by GoldenGate revealed that in markets such as financial services, technology and government, SQL Server is increasingly used for mission-critical applications. GoldenGate reads the database log, encrypts the committed transactions, and moves them across the network to the target(s). The data is moved bi-directionally while maintaining transaction integrity. In the event of a primary system outage, users are immediately pointed to the second fully synchronized system. "This is a forward-looking approach to availability," Akbay explained. "We are about providing continuous business operation."
GoldenGate 9.0 also includes enhanced capabilities for high-availability, disaster tolerance and real-time data integration for data warehousing and reporting. "Every release, we try to make sure there is a noticeable increase in performance," "We are always looking for ways to streamline processes and increase speed."
In addition to improved performance, heterogeneity was a primary focus as well, Chris McAllister, director of product management, related to 5 Minute Briefing. "With support for SQL Server and DB2 z/OS, we are not only following the trends, but expanding our footprint in organizations," he said. "They have mixed environments. With 9.0, customers can use the same technology platform for keeping even more of their database application environments highly available." For more information on GoldenGate, click here.
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Red Gate Announces SQL Refactor
Red Gate Software, provider of tools for Microsoft technology developers and database administrators, has announced the release of SQL Refactor, a software add-on for SQL Server Management Studio that provides database-refactoring tools for SQL Server. According to Red Gate, this is a first for SQL Server.
"SQL Refactor really revolutionizes the way you work with SQL script," Richard Collins, product manager at Red Gate, told 5 Minute Briefing during a private interview. "We could see a very clear need for something that would help database professionals speed of coding."
SQL Refactor includes customizable SQL layout settings; automatic, intelligent object renaming with all dependent references; instant summarization of long and complex scripts and queries; encapsulation of script portions as separate stored procedures; one-click uppercasing of keywords; and the ability to split a table while maintaining referential integrity. "This can handle stuff that is really tedious, as well as stuff that is really tricky," Collins explained. "It's a great way to maintain company coding standards. You can really bring order to your database and SQL script. The script also becomes more reusable across the development team." For more information on Red Gate and SQL Refactor, click here.
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Mendocino Software Moves Beyond Recovery to Secondary Data Management
In what the company officials have described as a milestone announcement, Mendocino Software has released InfiniView, a new product architecture, based on its core continuous data protection (CDP) technology, that enables end-users to create and use multiple "virtual views" of production data for a variety of functions, including rapid application recovery, testing and development, data analytics, reporting, disk staging, or any off-host processing task that has been done previously using conventional backup or snapshot technologies. The company also announced the availability of the first application blade for the InfiniView platform, an enterprise recovery solution for Microsoft Exchange Server.
"We have leveraged our existing technology to go after an expanded space beyond recovery," Eric Burgener, vice president, marketing at Mendocino, told 5 Minute Briefing. InfiniView reflects an evolution of the company's continuous data protection technology. Its scalable architecture and modular application-specific filters allow users to optimize many administrative tasks for which conventional copy technologies performed poorly.
According to Burgener, Mendocino developed Infiniview in response to the way companies were actually using its RecoveryOne continuous data protection solution. For example, one major client used the technology to generate additional BI-oriented reports without putting added workload on the production database. In essence, Burgener said, Mendocino customers wanted additional views of the data so in the new technology, data capture and viewing has been split into two engines. That allows Mendocino to provide additional views of the data for test environments, development environments, data analytics and reporting, audit operations and compliance and data staging without scaling up the data capture components.
Designed as an application 'blade' for easy plug-and-play into InfiniView-based appliances, the introduction of the enterprise recovery solution for Microsoft Exchange Server makes Mendocino the first vendor to combine the comprehensive application coverage offered by block-based data capture with a filter that enables application-specific object viewing and recovery. The same appliance can be used to capture data and provide view creation across multiple heterogeneous operating systems, including application environments such as enterprise database and file systems, offering a centralized point of zero impact access to copies of production data to help optimize application-level recovery, administrative and maintenance operations. The company's product roadmap calls for the development of table-level recovery technology for databases as well as additional application-specific filters. For more information on the company, go here.
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Pitney Bowes Group 1 Releases Data Flow 6.0; Introduces CDQ Platform
Pitney Bowes Group 1 Software has announced the release of Data Flow 6.0, the latest version of its data integration product, featuring enhancements to maintainability and metadata exchange. The company has also introduced its Customer Data Quality (CDQ) Platform, designed to enable businesses and government agencies to better manage their customer data by matching and consolidating information from across the enterprise into a single, comprehensive system of record.
Data Flow is an integration engine that brings together data from different sources into a single server where a set of data transformation tools can merge and cleanse the data and apply business rules to enhance its business value. "One of the differentiators for DataFlow has always been around ease of use and we view 'ease of use' as really something for productivity and that impacts end-users, developers and administrators," Ellen Raynor, vice president of product marketing for Global Data Quality, told 5 Minute Briefing.
The new release includes robust support for hierarchical data sets, automation enhancements, re-useable subplans, expanded "drill-to-detail" capabilities for reporting, and usability enhancements, including plan folders, better workspace management. The product's user interface has also been updated, said Rayor. "It is important for people to be able to use it in a way that they are used to using other products that they have in their productivity environment." With the release of version 6.0, Data Flow also includes enhanced support for flat file metadata.
Built on a service-oriented architecture (SOA) framework, Group 1 Software's CDQ Platform is intended to help organizations "manage, match, enrich, cleanse and consolidate" information and do that "in a way that can be centrally managed and configured so that you are driving true consistency across the enterprise, versus point-level embedded solutions," Navin Sharma, director of product management for global data quality, Pitney Bowes Group 1, explained. While the technology "is built on a strong foundation of a service-oriented architecture - that is the new rollout or new evolution," said Sharma, "the underlying functional components are based on our legacy, traditional knowledgebase that we have had over the 25 years of our existence."
The CDQ Platform leverages an extensive knowledgebase and allows analysts to easily create custom business rules as new composite services that can be published and extended to the enterprise, enabling companies to unify customer account data, eliminate redundancies, link members of the same household, and expand customer knowledge. In addition to providing an integrated framework for both batch and transactional CDQ, and rich support for integration with C, C++, VB.COM, C#/.NET, Java, Web services, and XML, the CDQ platform also supports Internet-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) delivery mode, and certified application connectors for SAP, Siebel and Microsoft Dynamics CRM. For more information, go here.
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ObjectRiver's Readies CA's Allfusion Erwin Data Modeler for SOA
ObjectRiver, a provider of master data management solutions to Web-enable enterprise data, has announced that the latest release of its MDM solution has been ca smart certified as interoperable with CA's AllFusion ERwin Data Modeler r7, an industry-leading data modeling solution that streamlines the creation and maintenance of databases, data warehouses and enterprise data models. "This brings Erwin into the SOA world," Steve Lemmo, ObjectRiver's founder and CTO, told 5 Minute Briefing at the BPM Institute Conference in New York last week.
Starting with a business data model, ObjectRiver MDM generates a data access layer that enables real-time updates and reduces database-programming complexity. By integrating with AllFusion ERwin Data Modeler, ObjectRiver's MDM also helps customers generate a data dictionary from the AllFusion ERwin model that provides a documented interface for building Web applications on top of a defined database. "It lets you build an enterprise architecture for SOA," Lemmo said. "CA's AllFusion ERwin Data Modeler is a natural starting point for creating Web/SOA-based applications because the vocabulary of the business is actually contained in the data model. Our relationship with CA gives IT managers the benefit of advanced modeling capabilities to optimize their operational data store. It also allows Java developers to use standard interfaces rather than time-consuming low-level SQL code, giving them more time to focus on business logic." The ca smart seal of excellence is awarded to products that integrate seamlessly with CA products, enabling customers to take advantage of best-in-class enterprise technologies while minimizing cost, time-to-benefit and risk. For more information, visit the Web site here.
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Purisma Announces Version 2 of Purisma Data Hub
Purisma, a provider of master data management (MDM) solutions, has introduced version 2 of the Purisma Data Hub. "It is really underpinning a new approach that we are taking to this market of master data management. And that is what we are calling 'solutions-driven' MDM as opposed to infrastructure-driven MDM," Bob Hagenau, vice president of products, told 5 Minute Briefing.
With Purisma Data Hub, companies can implement MDM and customer data integration (CDI) projects to quickly respond to such specific business challenges as creating a single view of a customer, identifying related corporate entities following a merger or acquisition, or identifying up-sell and cross-sell opportunities, according to the company. With Purisma Data Hub's expandable data model companies can start with a small master record and expand it as needed.
Purisma Data Hub (formerly called Purisma Customer Registry) offers a continuous learning system for matching data. It accumulates knowledge of the data from across the enterprise, creates a superset of information, retains and links all data from all source systems, and continues to learn from reference authorities and from data stewardship activities. "Purisma Data Hub will learn and get better and better over time at being able to recognize the same customer in different flavors," said Hagenau.
Purisma Data Hub synchronizes both data and the newly found knowledge across the various source systems. It can synchronize new discoveries gained from the master record, such as "which customers are premier customers," with the source systems, enabling access to the information throughout the enterprise. Additionally, from a single interface, a data steward can load, update, analyze, view, and correct the data. For more information, go here.
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