Product Roadmap for SQLBase

[michael]

 Posted by:  Michael Hummel 

free single user version for mobile workers.
(like sqlserverexpress and others)

actualy our mobile users have to pay twice for sqlbase connections (one for
a mobile sqlbase, one for the server when replicating data). this is really
not uptodate license politic.

best regards
michael

[David Drager]

 Posted by:  David Drager 

Feroz,

Rebuilding a table by unloading and reloading it is more likely to increase
your concurrency problems than to decrease them. You end up getting more
records per page, which can speed up data access, but increase the chance
for locking problems.

You do not need to change your applications to run against SQLBase 11. You
will gain some of the concurrency improvements without making coding
changes. There are other concurrency improvements like the RC isolation
level that does require minor code changes.

Make sure that transactions that update the PARTY table are very short and
do not select from the PARTY table. Make sure that any transaction that
fails immediately does a rollback. Make sure you commit or rollback first
and then report success or failure to the user.

Good luck,

David

[David Drager]

 Posted by:  David Drager 

Feroz,

As you suspect you would need to unload and reload to get back to SQLBase 9
from SQLBase 11. This will only work if you not use any of the new features
of SQLBase 11 like auto-increment.

I would suggest testing SQLBase 11 soon. It is always safer if you test
using a test database. I think you will find SQLBase 11 cleaner than other
recent versions. Once you have validated your applications are working
correctly then you could do some production testing without coding changes.
Later you could look at using the newer features of SQLBase 11.

Regards,

David

[Ron Kuris]

 Posted by:  Ron Kuris 

Hi Jim,

This is excellent feedback, and very similar to what we got when we started
working on SQLBase 11. The RC isolation level resolves most of these
problems, at least on those systems that have tried it so far.

RC causes selects not to get locks at all. This doesn't degrade performance
for the normal users nearly as much as it did if you were using RL.

While it sounds like it's a bit too late for your remaining SQLBase
databases, perhaps this will help others with similar problems.

Ron

[Ron Kuris]

 Posted by:  Ron Kuris 

Hello,

This sounds again like the classic problem we addressed in SQLBase 11. Have
you tried using the RC isolation level? This will avoid the deadlock.

We fixed a LOT of bugs for SQLBase 11. When we acquired Gupta, we didn't
think their priorization of bugs was very good, so we looked at the list.
There were "low" priority optimizer problems in there! Does your lockup
problem have a case number with tech support?

I'm not familiar with the SYSADM problem so if you can elaborate on that one
also that would be great.

Also, we did some last-minute work speeding up CHECK DATABASE for SQLBase
11.

We are aware of the index problem (specifying which index to use), but
weren't able to fix that for 11, but we may find time to get that in the
next release (not sure yet). The way we intend to address this is to allow
you to specify an index NOT to use, rather than "use this index". This is
because the syntax required for "use this index" really means "use this
plan, with this method between each index", and that is hard to represent in
SQL.

Ron

[Ron Kuris]

 Posted by:  Ron Kuris 


Can you elaborate on why you need to keep compatibility with earlier
versions of SQLBase? This is important for us to address in future
releases.

Ron

[Ron Kuris]

 Posted by:  Ron Kuris 

Arunas,

Do you mean for LONG types or for CHARs or both?

Ron

[David Drager]

 Posted by:  David Drager 

Feroz,

I did some more checking and found out more about using unload & reload to
move off of Version 11.

- The first line of the unload has a command "Set LOADVERSION XXXXX".
Where XXXXX is the version number. This version number would need to be
changed before the reload.
- While engineering thinks that this will work if you do not use any new
features like autoincrement, this has not yet been tested with Version 11.

As I suggested before you should avoid testing in production. This
technique should only be used in emergency situations. I will see if I can
get this technique tested with Version 11.

Regards,

David

[FRBhote]

 Posted by:  F R Bhote 

Auto generation of numbers to vreate a unique key can be done in SB 11, but
many users will continue on SB 7.5 / 8.5 and auto increments cannot be used
there.

[FRBhote]

 Posted by:  F R Bhote 

So far the "Set LOADVERSION XXXXX" has worked more as a comment AFAIK. I've
loaded 8.5 sql files into 7.5.1 with this statement intact and had no
problems.

[TimFoster]

 Posted by:  Tim Foster 

Our maximum user volume consists of a few 50 user installations, although
I'm unsure if the full concurrency is really utilized. We support over 100
clients, perhaps 30-40% running network editions... As far as single-user
instances go, everyone is running 8.5... In network-land, a variety of
engines have been implimented, from 6.1.2 onward. In our industry --
payroll and taxes -- most organizations are very cautious and reluctant to
upgrade business critical components -- IE, if it ain't broke, don't fix
it... Especially when they're unlikely to see immediate performance gains,
as our application doesn't exploit many of the newer features...

Backwards compatibility is very important to us -- we provide year-end tax
filing software for large corporations, storing and processing employee
W-2's. Applications are released anually -- and due to the nature of the
bid'ness, and the desire to archive tax data as long as possible, we find
clients may continuing to host legacy data and applications going all the
way back to 1994! As the front end components were all 16bit back then, and
we have niether the time nor desire to recode past software releases to
include 32bit libraries, we find we are in a constant state of environmental
flux. At times we're forced to get 16bit single user engines to play nicely
with 32bit single user engines on the same machine, sometimes easy,
sometimes not... Or we find ourself installing our software on machines
containing other vendors mismatched, misversioned SQLBase components (we
install a single user, they have a network client install, vice-versa,
etc...) These are all issues we encounter somewhat regularly, and though
most can be overcome through .BAT file trickery, renaming folders and such,
a respectful attempt to maintain compatibility would be greatly appreciated!

A few clients host our software, in addition to other internal applications
on Oracle 8.x backends... this has kept us at Team Developer 3.0 PTF4 -- as
the newer releases no longer support Older oracle components... So all in
all, with respect to both products... backwards compatibility! :-)

[FRBhote]

 Posted by:  F R Bhote 

There is one more feature in Sqltalk which will help us in remote
maintenance:

The session setting for Error Level should be 3 by default and (I don't
think that anyone really saves what he does in SqlTalk) Never Save Sript on
Exit.

Perhaps the default Isolation Level should be changed to RC?

The old WinTalk (and Quest) had some nice Import / Export features -
especially to export to CSV - we cannot export ASCII if a non-ASCII symbol
exists and therefore it is impossible to change to PCTFREE of a large table
if a non-ASCII character exists.

[RainerE]

 Posted by:  Rainer Ebert 

Regarding SQLTalk:

- We need Saving on Exist in SqlTalk because we write all our update scripts
with SqlTalk
- Default Isolation Level should be RL for us

And please correct many of those silly bugs of SqlTalk:
- Improve SqlTalk to be a simple text editor (like notepad)
- e.g. Find Again in Input Window does not work
- Support german umlaut characters in filenames
- Font of Execution Plan window sometimes changes after 2nd or 3rd or...
select

And what would be great to:
- syntax highlighting
- Grid for output

[arvindram11]

 Posted by:  Aravind Ram 

I second these requests. And a workable undo option (Or is that already
fixed in 4.2?).

Aravind

[Yoda]

 Posted by:  Yoda 

Well, you can try out SQLEngineer. It has these features and can be
found on the IceTeaGroup websute.

Best Regards
Karthik