Having spent my entire career in IT, I wasn’t expecting to learn so much in my first three months in a new position. Of course, I knew that with the transition there would come an adjustment period, as there is in any role, but the sheer amount of information I’ve absorbed in the past weeks has been both exciting and overwhelming.
Case in point: MultiValue. When I joined Rocket Software—whose MultiValue portfolio includes Rocket D3, Rocket U2 (UniVerse and UniData), and Rocket mvBase—back in November, I was excited to learn more about this platform. I knew MultiValue had a long and storied past with a dedicated following, but I never realized how strong the platform really is. Imagine my reaction, then, upon learning that applications built with MultiValue require considerably less CPU and storage needs in a number of common situations. And did you know you can actually run MultiValue-based applications anywhere, including private and public clouds?
The last three months, then, have been exciting for me as I delve deeper into the MultiValue world. And in the spirit of learning, I’ve compiled here a list of some of the most surprising and interesting facts about MultiValue that I’ve learned in just a few short months.
- MultiValue runs anywhere: If you’re like me, you might have had the impression that MultiValue runs only on large private servers running obscure Linux distributions. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. MultiValue applications can run in any computing environment, from private cloud to leading public clouds including AWS, Azure, and Google. The benefit of public cloud offerings, of course, is the opportunity to reduce your cost of ownership and let someone else manage the physical infrastructure. MultiValue lets you take full advantage of those savings. Combined with the fact that many MultiValue applications can be run without a dedicated data administrator, this makes MultiValue an extremely cost-efficient platform.
- MultiValue data structures are highly conducive for data analytics: Because of the digital revolution, more data is available today than ever before. Almost everything is becoming “smart,” whether it’s your car or your watch or your home security system. But all this data is useless, from a business perspective, if you don’t collect and analyze it. This kind of data is actually easier to store in a multidimensional database, making MultiValue a competitive choice for a variety of live data analysis situations.
- MultiValue accelerates application development: MultiValue data structures capture the natural structure of business transactions as they are in the real world, making it easier to understand how the data will be used in business workflows. This also leads to a number of other benefits, including intuitive data modeling, fewer tables, fewer joins, better space utilization on the disk, and much better performance. And since MultiValue supports a multiple-values-to-a-key format as well as embedded structures, it’s simple to define and maintain applications that manage data such as inventory levels, course schedules, and patient records.
- MultiValue features state-of-the-art security: The ability to develop applications that adhere to rigorous security requirements isn’t unique to MultiValue, but it’s nonetheless a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for a quality application platform. MultiValue’s audit logging capabilities are extremely beneficial for creating applications that must adhere to HIPAA, HITECH, SOX, and many other security standards. What’s more, MultiValue’s flexible audit logging module can be configured for everything from a very high-level view of system-level activity to user-specific file-access logging, change logging, and even program and process logging.
- MultiValue offers easy data entry: All these benefits for IT and development would be meaningless if the end user ended up suffering as a result. Thankfully, that’s not the case with MultiValue. To the user, MultiValue-based applications function the same as any other kind of application or even better, in some instances. Thanks to the platform’s flexible data structure, it can make entering data simpler in certain instances, such as an application for physicians that allows users to enter as much information as necessary without any rigid data constraints.
These are just a few facts about MultiValue that have grabbed my attention in my short time with MultiValue. I’m sure with a platform with such depth and flexibility that I’ll only continue to discover new and exciting facts about MultiValue the longer that I continue to work with it.