DBMS - December 1996 - Server Side

DBMS, December 1996 DBMS Online: Server Side By Martin Rennhackkamp

One from the Road

Martin Travels the Globe to Report from CA World '96 in New Orleans.

Computer Associates International Inc.'s CA World '96 was held from August 25 to 29, 1996 in New Orleans. Attended by 18,000 business and technology professionals from 69 countries and six continents, the conference featured hundreds of hardware, software, and service companies, in addition to literally thousands of technical sessions, software demonstrations, and free education sessions.

The six-acre World Resource Center (WRC), which formed the "hub" of the conference, was located in the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center. It housed more than 5000 workstations and servers and more than 200 exhibitors. The computers in the WRC were all interlinked to the 15 largest hotels in the area, CA's global heterogeneous network, and the World Wide Web -- using 150,000 feet of fiber-optic cable. The WRC was connected by three T1 lines to CA's headquarters in Islandia, New York. The computers in the WRC ran Windows NT, Unix, VAX/VMS, OpenVMS, and mainframe operating systems, and TCP/IP, SNA, IPX, SPX, NetBEUI, and DECNet network protocols. The WRC was the largest computing infrastructure ever assembled in New Orleans -- estimated to rival the complexity and size of a computing infrastructure that can support a $1 billion global enterprise.

The keynote speakers of the conference were Charles Wang, chairman and CEO of CA; retired U.S. General Colin Powell; and Bill Gates, chairman and CEO of Microsoft Corp. The conference was divided into 14 subject areas, and each subconference had its own keynote speakers, technical sessions, and networking events. For most of the conference, I attended Ingres World, the third largest subconference, which was jointly hosted by CA and the Northern American Ingres User Association (NAIUA).There is much to report from CA World '96, but in this month's column I will restrain myself to a review of some of the products and applications that were showcased there.

CA-OpenIngres

Many of the technical sessions on CA-OpenIngres focused on release 2.00, which is expected to be in beta at the end of 1996. Release 2.00, which was demonstrated in the WRC, features a true, internally multi-threaded architecture that exploits as much of the multi-threading capabilities of the underlying operating system as possible. This capability, together with a new multicache implementation, provides a scalable architecture that can be applied equally well to clustered processors and to SMP and MPP architectures, the latter with full thread migration between processors. Another new interesting feature of release 2.00 is a configurable row-level locking scheme, whereby row-level locking can be specified on a per-table or per-session basis. This scheme lets one user access a given table using row-level exclusive locks, while another user accesses the same table using page-level shared locks. Release 2.00 also features configurable page sizes, whereby the data-transfer sizes between the caches and the physical databases can be configured as 2K, 4K, 8K, 16K, or 32K. This flexible scheme removes all of the row-width limitations previously imposed by the fixed 2K page sizes. Other changes include parallel backup and restore operations from the command line (which previously had to be written in a script file), optimizer changes to improve the estimations of join cardinalities, statement-level rule firing (which previously was only row-level), and various other improvements that affect general throughput, access speeds, and resource utilization.

CA-OpenIngres and the Internet

As Charles Wang and Bill Gates emphasized in their keynote speeches, Intranets, the Internet, and the World Wide Web are receiving an enormous amount of attention. As such, a lot of focus was placed on the Internet Computing Enabled (ICE) components of the various CA products; CA-OpenIngres, with its "ICE-ed" Web server called iiweb, is no exception. However, release 2.00 will ship with a Spyglass Web server as part of the base product. This server will support all of the popular Web APIs, such as Java, JDBC, ISAPI, and it will provide enhanced functionality to handle complex data types such as BLOBs. Spyglass will also be able to generate HTML pages from SQL commands.

Cases in Point: Internet Implementations

At the conference, Bill Davis and Bob Gilpin of the Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory of Colorado State University (Fort Collins, Colo.) gave an interesting presentation on CA-OpenIngres release 1.2 with the ICE module. Davis and Gilpin use it for the USDA UV-B Radiation Monitoring Program, which is funded by various state grants. They use all of the capabilities offered by the CA-OpenIngres iiweb server to provide Web-based access to their data. Users choose the data they are interested in, either by using a list of options containing reference links, by filling in an HTML form, or by clicking on an image map. For example, from a digitized map of the United States, with various sampling stations indicated on it, users can select a state or specific sampling station by clicking on it. Users can also select their output format as a report, a delimited data file, or a chart in graphics form (such as a pie chart). The data in the CA-OpenIngres databases is accessed by embedding Ingres reports and dynamic SQL statements in CGI scripts. The scripts then run the output files, which are the output data formatted as sets of HTML statements. You can visit Davis and Gilpin's Web site, driven by CA-OpenIngres/ICE, at http://uvb.nrel.colostate.edu/UVB/.

Mark Kale and Mike Leo, of York and Associates Inc. (Minneapolis), presented another Internet-related product, a native Java-to-Ingres driver that supports Java DataBase Connectivity (JDBC). Although a route exists from Java to CA-OpenIngres via ODBC, CA-Ingres/Net, and TCP/IP, the team wanted to develop a native driver to bypass the multiprotocol stack and advance its expertise in delivering mission-critical, object-oriented applications that access existing relational data sources. They demonstrated a native Java implementation of JDBC, coded as Java class files, that accesses a CA-OpenIngres database using a fast, proprietary protocol. This implementation enables Java application developers to code Java applications and call the Java classes required to access the necessary relational databases; developers no longer need to know how to access relational databases. Until the site is available to the public, you can contact Kale and Leo via email at mdkale@aol.com.

CA-OpenIngres/Desktop

Another exciting development at CA is the evolution from Centura SQLBase to CA-OpenIngres/Desktop (for the rest of this section referred to as Desktop). Many presentations at the conference focused on Desktop, including one by Tom Schoenborn, the development manager of Desktop, who described how to (and how not to) replicate data between CA-OpenIngres and Desktop databases to achieve the goals of mobile computing. One of my two presentations was titled "Taking CA-OpenIngres/Desktop Seriously," in which I compared the features of CA-OpenIngres 1.2 with those of Desktop 1.1 and gave a sneak preview of the features and look-and-feel of Desktop 1.2 (the first truly "Ingresified" version of SQLBase). Desktop 1.2 is not expected to go into beta until later in the year, but I had the good fortune to work closely with the developers in evaluating this release. In release 1.2 of Desktop, all of the CA-OpenIngres client applications can access the Desktop database through a CA-OpenIngres/Desktop gateway, so a wealth of application development tools are available to the Desktop developer.

A Case in Point: Staying Connected

Karen Bishop of the Foreign Mission Board (FMB) of the Southern Baptist Convention (Richmond, Va.) gave two interesting presentations on Desktop. One illustrated the need of the FMB's 125 field offices to have mobile databases, which must be synchronized regularly with their home office database. The field staff travels regularly to as many as 131 countries around the world. Bishop presented their various implementation options, described how they have implemented their Desktop databases, and explained how they currently keep them synchronized manually from a master Desktop database, which is regularly refreshed from the CA-OpenIngres databases at their home office. She also described their migration plans when Desktop 1.1/03 with mobile replication becomes generally available.

Bishop's other presentation revealed how her group developed a full multimedia touch-screen application in CA-OpenROAD (CA's GUI application development environment, previously known as Windows4GL), to access the staff's mobile Desktop databases. This application, which she demonstrated during the presentation, contains video clips, audible help in multiple languages, various photographs, maps, and other graphical objects.

CA-Jasmine

After traveling for a total elapsed time of 21 hours, including a sleepless night on the plane, a four-hour layover in Miami, and a seven-hour time change, I arrived in New Orleans late Saturday afternoon before the conference -- only to learn that the next day was the only time I could attend the Jasmine Software Developers Kit (SDK) training without missing any of the other technical sessions. Time was tight -- and I still wanted to explore Bourbon Street that evening (after all, it was Saturday in the jazz capital of the world). Well, a plunge in the hotel's swimming pool, a few cups of coffee, a few vitamins, and a gulp of tonic saw me through Sunday's training after a late Saturday night at the Jazz Cafe and Rhythms (personally recommended in that order).

Jasmine is CA's all-encompassing, buzzword-compliant (as they call it), object-oriented database and application development environment. Jasmine is the result of an extensive collaboration between CA and Fujitsu. During the training session, the two companies often mentioned the following buzzwords: dynamic, Internet-enabled, bandwidth-sensitive, 3D virtual reality, animation, object-persistent, mission-critical, multimedia, open, and social/interactive/cool interfaces. The comprehensive training covered the CA-Jasmine application development approach, object database, object and class hierarchy model, Jasmine Application Development Environment (JADE), object database query language (ODQL), and API. I was duly convinced that Jasmine is, indeed, buzzword-compliant.

With Jasmine, you don't write procedures or create forms, frames, or tables. You create scenes, you define classes and objects as instances of these classes, and you send messages to invoke the methods of the classes. Some of these methods may, behind the scenes, access "legacy" data stored in a relational database -- for example, data managed by the relatively recently released CA-OpenIngres 1.2.

Having seen CA's Wired-Wired-World Jasmine demonstration (featuring a 3D, online, database-driven Western clothing and CD store where you can order cowboy outfits and country music) three times before, as well as twice on the Jasmine and CA World promotional videos, I was ready to walk out of the demonstration part (for another quick plunge in the pool). Fortunately I stayed, because this time CA demonstrated a very cool, classy, and slick application created for The House of Dior. It featured various outfits suitable for different types of occasions, as well as the individual Dior pieces. (At Dior they are not called garments and definitely not called clothes.) The workshop showed how the message called "turn around" would invoke the method called "rotate" for a boot, and it would invoke the method called "swish" for a skirt. Now that is inheritance and polymorphism in action. As part of the training, we could explore and extend the Dior demonstration, but we weren't allowed to change the price tags. I didn't think to try anything sacrilegious such as renaming the piece class to a garment class.

Development Partners

Although I didn't have time to interview some of the Jasmine beta application developers, I investigated two interesting Jasmine development partners who had stands in the WRC. HAHTSite by HAHT Software (Raleigh, N.C.) is a comprehensive Internet application development and deployment environment. It was developed by the same group that founded Q+E Software, the database connectivity company, a few years ago. It has two components, namely the HAHTSite Integrated Development Environment (IDE) and the HAHTSite Application Server.

The essence of the HAHTSite deployment environment is the HAHTSite multi-threaded application server, which maintains the applications' contexts on the various databases accessed through it. (See Figure 1.) The HAHTSite server maintains your application's sessions and transactions on the various databases, eliminating the problem encountered in most database-driven Web applications where the connection to the database must be reestablished with every request for data from the Web page. Although the HAHTSite multi-threaded application server interests me in particular, application developers will be very impressed with the IDE. You can create Web applications by pointing, clicking, dragging, and dropping various objects on the desktop. If you want to implement more intricate application logic, you can code it using HAHTalk, which is syntax-compatible with Microsoft Visual Basic. The IDE manages all of the application components through multiple project cycles, and it can be used to publish the resulting application components over a large, diverse distributed deployment environment. HAHTSite already caters to all of the popular relational databases, including CA-OpenIngres, Oracle, and Sybase, as well as all of the popular file systems and any APIs, DLLs, and shared libraries available on the server. It is currently being extended to cater to Jasmine as well. Additional information on HAHT Software and HAHTSite is available at http://www.haht.com.

Excalibur Technologies Corp.'s (Vienna, Va.) RetrievalWare SDK is a rich application development environment that includes text and image servers, called Text Server and Image Server, respectively. The servers interface with the RetrievalWare Web server to provide rich text and image functions to Web-based applications. The Text Server provides pattern-matching and semantic, textual searching functions; the Image Server provides adaptive pattern-recognition processing and searching functions. One of Excalibur's Image Server demonstrations illustrated fingerprint matching; the other illustrated searches for similar-looking butterflies. The RetrievalWare components support various APIs, including an open relational DBMS gateway and a set of relational DBMS interface DLLs. This application is currently being extended to support Jasmine as well. More information on Excalibur Technologies and RetrievalWare can be found at http://www.xrs.com.

A Storm in Your Glass

So what do you get when you assemble 18,000 business and technology professionals from all over the world for five days in New Orleans, one of the entertainment capitals of the world? Although the combined event night for the entire conference featured three jazz bands, partying seemed generally of secondary importance. Everyone actually arrived on time and awake for their 8:15 a.m. technical sessions. CA World '96 proved to be quite useful -- whether it was to meet and network with peers from all over the world, attend training classes, learn about new products and new technology, or only to learn what "hurricanes" down south were really all about.

Figure 1.

--The HAHTSite multi-threaded server architecture.

Martin Rennhackkamp is the owner and principal consultant of The Data Base Approach, a corporation specializing in relational and distributed databases, based in Cape Town, South Africa. You can reach Martin via the Internet at mr@dba.co.za.

Computer Associates International Inc., One Computer Associates Plaza, Islandia, NY 11788; 800-225-5224, 516-342-5224, or fax 516-342-5734; http://www.cai.com.

Please send questions or comments to dbms@mfi.com
Updated Monday, November 18, 1996