The first trade show I ever attended was DB/Expo. I won't say what year it was, but back then DB/Expo was the hottest show in town. I recall the challenge of navigating the crowds to get from one end of San Francisco's Moscone Center to the other. I remember how overwhelming it was to try and take in everything, and how frustrating it was that no matter how hard I tried, I always missed something.
Times have changed, as has the industry, and the needs of trade show-goers are no longer what they were just a few years ago. This is reflected in dwindling exhibitor and attendee counts at all the major shows, particularly DB/Expo. There is a silver lining at the end of my story, however, and that is that DB/Expo has permuted into a new event that will be called IT Forum. The show will make its debut in New York on September 15 at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center, with a spring show in San Francisco next year. IT Forum expands the scope of DB/Expo to include the Unix and Windows NT Expo, and it will continue to feature the Internet/Intranet Expo as well. It will have three tracks: IT Integration; Application, Database, and Web Development; and Operating Systems, Networking, and Internet. (See www.itforum.com for regular show updates.)
And so now you understand why it is that I am reporting on the last DB/Expo, which took place in San Francisco on May 12-16. Here's a wrap-up of the show highlights.
Vision Software (Oakland, Calif.) announced its Vision JADE (Java Application Declarative Environment), a development environment that lets you create business applications by declaring or defining the business rules that, in turn, generate Java applications. Through the declarative environment, you can build multitier, component-based Java applications. The IDE includes an advanced events-based code editor with visual events objects, a business rules designer to capture business rules visually, a hierarchical Repository Explorer for navigation, and an application designer to capture form flows and data flows. Server components include connection pooling and lightweight threads, distributed objects, connections to legacy data and packaged applications, and partitioning of client and server logic.
SQRIBE Technologies (Menlo Park, Calif.) continues to position itself in the thin-client enterprise reporting arena with two new product announcements. First is InSQRIBE, a desktop push-pull product that embeds information access capabilities into desktop applications. The 32-bit application development environment supports all scripting tools that support ActiveX, and it includes three ActiveX extensions for data access and reporting. Second, the company announced a new release of SQR Workbench for Windows 95 and NT. The 32-bit version offers enhanced push capabilities, a visual development environment, ad hoc reporting capabilities, and support for local and remote execution.
Meanwhile, Simba Technologies Inc. (Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada) is attempting to gain marketshare on the desktop with SimbaClient for Java and SimbaEngine 4.0. SimbaClient for Java lets Java-based applications and applets connect via SimbaExpress servers to multiple, distributed corporate databases. The new version of SimbaEngine has been optimized for faster execution of complex queries, support for Windows NT, an expanded API, support for third-party data access middleware, and a portable source-code option that lets you access data residing in legacy and special-purpose operating environments via SimbaEngine.
Tandem Computers Inc. (Cupertino, Calif.) is expanding its borders beyond its proprietary NonStop Himalaya platform for cluster computing with the announcement of NonStop SQL/MX, an open, parallel DBMS. NonStop SQL/MX runs on any Intel- and Windows NT-based system as well as on Tandem's NonStop Himalaya servers. NonStop SQL/MX supports an integrated object/relational data mining architecture as well as Informix DataBlade technology. To prove the product's clustering capabilities, Tandem demonstrated a two-terabyte database containing a table of 30 billion rows, divided into more than 700 partitions for massive parallelism, and running on a 64-processor Windows NT server cluster. Yikes.