Show Report

Tuesday, August 23
Keynote
Tuesday's keynote was incredible! While walking into the event center where the keynotes were, we were met by "demonstrators" demanding that the secrets of "Area 15" be made known. They were handing out National Enquirer-style newsletters that included articles about Raj Nathan being abducted by aliens, Tom Traubitz being mistakenly launched into outer space, and even an update on the whereabouts of Mitchell Kertzman. Then, in the center, there was a green light stick on every seat. Later, MIB agents arrived in what appeared to be a Hummer and took position on stage, followed by aliens beaming down Raj Nathan in their midst so he could deliver his keynote.

Raj Nathan discussed improvements in ASE 15.0. He talked first about the three major components in "data explosion":

• Volume
• Variety
• Velocity

He then indicated that in ASE 15.0, Sybase is responding to that by:

• Improving performance
• Reducing operation complexity and risk
• Containing operation costs

Specifically, ASE offers:

• Operations Optimizations
• Archiving
• Auditing
• Availability
• Value Extraction
• Replication
• Information integration
• Orchestration
• Portal and dashboard
• Events/alerts
• Search
• BAM
• Semantic UI
• ETL
• Analytics engine
• App mobilization

"Special agent" (and TeamSybase member) Rob Verschoor was then beamed onto the stage. Rob demonstrated new encryption technology, database performance improvements, and object-level recovery. Next "Special agent" Havier was beamed on stage to demonstrate the new mapping editor that has been added to the replication server modeling component in PowerDesigner. He also demonstrated heterogeneous warm backup and the Workspace product (in which the PowerBuilder database painter makes an appearance).

Afterward, ISUG President Cindy Bean presented the International Sybase User Group Innovation and Achievement Awards. The winners were TeamSybase member Kevin Sherlock and the very active newsgroup participant Chris Pollach. Then iAnywhere President Terry Stepien presented the iAnywhere awards to Sheker Swamy, president and CEO of Afaria customer American Technology Corporation, and to Frank Imholz, managing director of Ultralite and Mobilink customer ELMO ICT Solutions.

Tuesday, August 23
Sessions
I attended Dave Dichman's "PowerDesigner Futures" session first. He discussed the following upcoming features:

• Power Designer 12.0 - Q1 2006
• UML
• Mapping Editor
• Improved database generation and reverse engineering
• Report wizard and list report
• Support for ASE 15 and PowerBuilder 10.5
• 12.1 - Q2 2006
• Visual Studio.NET Plug In
• 12 +
• Support Enterprise Architect
• Improve Enterprise Modeling

Next was Buck Woolley's "Advanced DataWindow Presentation Techniques for PowerBuilder, PocketBuilder, and DataWindow.NET." Buck has a rather slow and even method of presenting, but what he was presenting was so stunning that the attendees were ooing and aahing. His stuff really needs to be seen to be believed. Even Reed Shilts (of PocketBuilder fame) who was sitting next to me was on the edge of his seat. Buck has samples at his www.dw-extreme.com Web site.

Finally, I sat in on the second of Dave Avera's "The State of the DataWindow and Plans for Its Future" sessions. Dave talked about where the DataWindow had come from and where it was currently. Some of the information was new even to me. For example, in one of my PBDJ articles on DataWindow.NET, I noted that the Modify and SetProperty methods of the DataWindow took RGB values for colors, whereas the .NET system colors are all ARGB colors. What Dave noted is that many of the color properties are directly exposed as properties and can be set directly using .NET ARGB values. Another example is the ValueInRow method for the ExpressionBasedProperty class, which is the equivalent of doing a Describe (Evaluate)..., but a whole lot easier to implement.

Dave then talked about DataWindow futures, including:

JavaServer Faces (JSF) DataWindow, which will be introduced in Workspace in a later version. It's currently being developed as a JNI wrapper around the current DataWindow control (so that bug fixes and enhancements don't have to be continually ported). So far it has been tested on Tomcat, Sun Application Server, and EAServer. Although the primary focus is on supporting JDBC drivers, the native drivers have been tested as well.

PowerBuilder 10.5 additions He discussed the TreeView format and the dropdown calendar edit style, which I've discussed previously. He did go into more depth on their plans for ADO.NET DataTable support. They are planning two methods of support:

1. Bind Model: When the DataWindow is bound to the underlying DataAdapter DataTable, the data is immediately copied to the DataWindow, and any changes to the data in the DataWindow are automatically applied to the DataTable. Updates are then handled through the standard DataAdapter methods. One downside of this approach is that, at least currently, some DataWindow methods are not supported (particularly Sort and Filter).
2. Retrieve/Update Model: After the DataWindow is associated to the DataTable, the data is not copied into the DataWindow until the Retrieve method is used. Similarily, the data in the DataTable is not updated until the DataWindow Update method is called. With this model, all DataWindow methods (including Sort and Filter) are supported. As with the Bind approach, the actual update of the underlying database tables is accomplished through the DataAdapter.

Dave mentioned that in DataWindow.NET they are also planning to add support for indexed access to DataWindow buffers. Farther in the future he indicated that they are considering a Master/Detail DataWindow and are planning on integrating the DataWindow Designer into the VS.NET IDE.