Scott Ferrett - The Enterprise Solution

Posted September 1 1997

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Scott had a PowerPoint presentation but unfortunately had not made copies available for attendees as had been requested of all the speakers. He also seemed surprised by a few things announced Monday by Bruce Barrington, so that some of the slides he did have were out of date.

The Enterprise Edition

Clarion has been good for small developers. TopSpeed is now working on making it good for all developers. The Professional edition is brilliant (Scott's words), the Standard edition is more limited, while the Enterprise edition includes Team Development, Data Modeling, and a deployment kit.

Buffering, a feature previously to be included only in the Enterprise edition will now be bundled into the professional as well.

Team Development

The Enterprise edition includes the PVCS Version manager, which seamlessly integrates into CW. This ensures projects are secure from code overwrites and provides an audit trail of archive information. He mentioned that one important use for him is when someone calls in with a bug to fix. By checking his audit trails, he can find out if this has already been fixed.

Data Modeling

A graphic display of the dictionary in included with the Enterprise edition. This is useful, although with very large dictionaries, it can get cumbersome. This product has several nice features (my words) including:

• Built in error checking. For example, if you are linking two files, and the linking field for one is a Long, and the linking field for the second is a Short, the Data Modeler will catch this.
• A change in one field cascades to other fields. For example, changing address1 in multiple files from 30 to 45 characters can be done in one place.
• A type pool utility, where your personalized defaults can be set.
• A favorite picture list, where your 'preferred' pictures can be maintained
• Data type defaults

Deployment Kit

Scott asked for a show of hands to see how many were using this tool. He estimated about 15 - 20% were using it. His comment was that some people really liked it, some really hated it.

Dictionary Synchronizer

Scott showed us a pre-alpha version of this tool. Using it, you can select multiple files to import into a new database. This has some limitations since there are some fields maintained on some types of databases ('owners' in Oracle) not kept in others (Clarion). This tool also generates the data conversion program for all files. It also moves groups of related tables, although moving a single file related to others takes a few more steps. This product also corrects latent dictionary defects, if you want it to, based on specific 'rules.' For the initial version, these rules will not be exposed to the designer.

Smart Buffering

This feature will also be in the Professional edition. It will provide optimal use of your network. Whereas now a single add can produce multiple network hits to accomplish its work, the smart buffering will try to minimize the number of hits. Client side caching will be used with some timeout limits so that if you leave your terminal for an extended period, the data will be refreshed.

Benefits of the Enterprise Edition

• Simplifies group development
• Reduces friction between developers and the Data Base Administrators
• Improves the productivity of the developers. Indeed, Scott felt this would be a useful tool not only for groups of developers but for a single developer.

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