DBMS - January 1998 - Soft Notes

Soft Notes

Compiled by Clara Parkes
DBMS, January 1998

Informatica Improves

Informatica Corp. announced PowerMart 4.0, an upgrade to the company's flagship product for building and managing data marts and data warehouses. PowerMart 4.0 now supports multidimensional views for OLAP analysis in additional to tabular views. PowerMart will be available in two versions: a standalone version for independent data marts and a networked version for multiple dependent data marts. Informatica also upgraded PowerCapture to version 1.1. PowerCapture automates the migration of incremental data updates from operational systems into data marts and warehouses. Informaticaıs newest product, PowerCenter 1.0, lets administrators centrally manage and integrate distributed data marts. PowerCenter uses a shared metadata repository to network multiple data marts. All three products were in beta at press time and should be shipping in January.

Contact Informatica Corp., Menlo Park, CA; 650-462-8900; www.informatica.com.

DSS Enterprise Embarks

Relational OLAP vendor MicroStrategy Inc. released DSS Objects 5.0, an OLE API for custom application development and system integration. DSS Objects 5.0 lets you customize your DSS applications and integrate them with industry-specific software packages. The product includes a set of high-level, prepackaged function and database calls to help you customize applications using standard programming languages including VB, VBA, C++, or Delphi.

Contact MicroStrategy Inc., Vienna, VA; 703-848-8600; www.microstrategy.com.

Kiva Trio

Kiva Software Corp. announced three new products for its Internet application platform: Kiva Enterprise Server 2.0, Kiva Developer Studio 2.0, and Kiva Extension Toolkit. The Kiva Enterprise Server 2.0 offers high-volume transaction processing capabilities on Unix and NT, as well as dynamic load balancing and partitioning, connection and results caching, and streaming, as well as native drivers for all the major RDBMSs. It includes prebuilt Kiva Extensions for integrating with TP monitors, as well as a distributed state manager with failover and failure detection/recovery capabilities, CORBA/IIOP support, and an integrated Enterprise Administrator tool.

Kiva Developer Studio 2.0 offers a component-based architecture with prebuilt system and application services. It is intended primarily for building prototypes of your applications, and as such it offers tight integration with leading tools from Powersoft, Microsoft, Symantec, Netscape, Sun MicroSystems, and Wallop Software. The product also offers expanded Java and C/C++ class libraries, enhanced wizards, and JDK 1.1 support.

Finally, Kiva Extension Toolkit 2.0 is a new visual development environment for rapidly building customized Kiva server extensions written in Java and C++. These extensions provide the interface to integrate with two- and three-tier client/server applications, legacy systems, and third-party Web application services.

Contact Kiva Software Corp., Mountain View, CA; 650-526-3900; www.kivasoft.com.

Whatıs Your Fortı?

Fortı Software Inc. announced Fortı WebEnterprise, a new product for developing enterprise-class Internet applications. Fortı WebEnterprise extends the Fortı Application Environment to the Web and component standards, including capabilities for Java component integration, dynamic HTML page generation, and session management across HTTP. The product supports the Java-Beans component model, automatically generating JavaBean interfaces for Fortı application services. In addition, through IIOP support, the product provides interoperability with Java and any other CORBA 2.0-compliant products.

Contact Fortı Software Inc., Oakland, CA; 510-869-3400; www.forte.com.

Soft Notes were compiled by DBMS executive editor Clara H. Parkes. You can email Clara at cparkes@mfi.com.

Please send questions or comments to dbms@mfi.com
Updated November 26, 1997