Message from the President
By Rick Ryan
1998 is just around the corner and here at CCA we are preparing to celebrate our second holiday season as "the new CCA." I am very pleased to tell you that CCA's license revenue in 1Q98 vs. 1Q97 has more than doubled. This represents your commitment to join with us in building and maintaining long-term relationships that leverage your investment in our technology.
This calendar year has seen continuing growth for our company: not just in terms of revenue - we have hired eighteen new development, support, and consulting staff over the last year and a half.
1997 has also seen us deliver new, Year 2000 ready releases of our flagship databases, Model 204 and System 1032. In addition to our own products, we have been marketing the SoftSpy product for Information Technology Systems. We will continue to seek opportunities to work with third-party vendors in this way to ensure that we continue to deliver superior solutions to you.
Of course, this year also saw what many customers described as "the best IMPACT in years." That's going to be a hard act to follow, but we'll certainly try. IMPACT'98 will be held in Miami in May of next year. I hope to see you there.
The 1997 Customer Communications Exercise is in its final stages. We have received and analyzed over 100 customer surveys and, in addition, we have held Regional Technical Advisory Meetings in San Antonio, Austin, Detroit, Ontario, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., Albany, Toronto, Canberra, and Maidenhead.
As a result of our collective thinking, the Initial Product Plans will be published later in December. The Executive Customer Advisory Board is scheduled to be held in February, with fully developed plans published later that month. Again, very warm thanks to those of you who participated.
One of the larger developments, arising from your input and the direction of the computer industry as a whole, is the creation of two new consulting services:
We are also developing scalable solutions for delivering access to multiple data sources on the Web. I won't make a formal announcement here, but the recent Washington User Group was given a live demonstration of our capabilities, which was very well received. In the near future, we will bring "CCA WebWare" to market.
On a separate note, some of you expressed an interest in Winter Corporation's Very Large Database (VLDB) Survey Program. I would urge those of you who have large databases or large numbers of users to go to the Winter Corporation's Web site ( www.wintercorp.com) and submit a survey response. Two CCA customers (Centrelink and Roadway) were placed in the top 10 in the category for the largest number of concurrent users last year with 10,000 and 2,700, respectively. They were the only two CCA customers who entered. We would very much like to see more examples of our database technology in action featured this time around. Not only do we benefit from the publicity, but there are also benefits for you in terms of prizes for submissions for both the individual contributors and your companies.
I hope to see you at IMPACT'98. Until then, I would like to wish you all a very pleasant holiday season and a happy New Year.
By Larry Renton
Has your company thought about how much time you will spend debugging and testing your User Language applications for Year 2000 issues and beyond? Have you thought about how these processes could be improved with the use of SoftSpy, a tool for interactive debugging, testing, and tuning your application? This article explores the ways that SoftSpy can speed up debugging and testing, while ensuring that your testing is thorough.
Your first step, cleaning up compile and runtime errors, can take time. For example, if you forget an END FIND statement, identifying the cause of the problem can be time-consuming.
SoftSpy, however, identifies the errors right in the code, where you can easily see the problem.
Your next step is to debug the program. Without SoftSpy, you might place many PRINT statements throughout the code to help you identify problems.
With SoftSpy, you can:
Speaking of nesting, what if you have programs with line numbers? With SoftSpy, because all the END loops and END IF statements are automatically inserted, changing line number programs is no more difficult than any other program.
How can you find all the variables that use dates? A date variable does not necessarily contain the word DATE or an abbreviation such as DT to identify itself.
And what about that variable that you forgot to resize, which is now truncating your 8-digit date? How are you going to find it if the variable was not defined at the top of the program? Which variable is actually truncating the date?
With SoftSpy, you can actually look at the values that are contained in any variable as the program executes, step by step if need be.
Another time-consuming task is working through the included code so that you know how it fits with the main program. How do you figure out if a problem exists in the main code or in an included routine?
SoftSpy automatically embeds the included code in with the main program.
Because tuning is easily done with SoftSpy, consider incorporating tuning changes with your Year 2000 changes. SoftSpy, when in tuning mode, highlights the line of code that consumes the most CPU. You can look at this line of code to determine if a few simple changes might improve the performance of the program.
How can you be sure that all the code has been thoroughly tested? And how often have you looked at code without knowing that it is never executed?
SoftSpy counts the number of times that each line of code is executed and reports on it. You can then ensure that every line of code is tested. It also points out those statements that are not touched - "dead" code.
Once your Year 2000 project is completed, how many other tools that you have purchased will continue to be of use?
SoftSpy is one tool that you will continue to appreciate as long as you maintain User Language code. SoftSpy is included with your V4R1 installation to try out.
To try SoftSpy on earlier Model 204 releases, or for more information on SoftSpy, contact your CCA sales representative.
Understanding System 1032 Text attributes
By Tym Stegner
The Text data type is the most general of System 1032 data types, because there are few restrictions on what is a legitimate value. Attributes are commonly defined as Text when the values are character strings. Your first decision in defining a Text attribute is whether to choose Text n (Fixed Length) or Text Varying.
Table 1: Comparing Text Varying and Fixed Length attributes
The storage requirement for Fixed Length Text attributes is straightforward: the number of spaces defined (Text n) multiplied by the number of records.
Text Varying attributes must store not only the length of the value and the length of update frequency expansion padding (see Table 2), but also some class information. Text Varying attributes are of two classes:
Each Text Varying attribute, large or small, requires 8 bytes of overhead: 4 bytes of address; 4 bytes of length information (value and expansion padding).
A rule of thumb to determine the size of these internal data structures is:
Each Text Varying attribute structure, large or small, is composed of 8 bytes, and each class header accounts for 8 bytes.
For example:
Note: The actual structure has a maximum of 8 bytes; 8 is used here as a measure of convenience.
Unlike Fixed Length Text attribute values, which are padded to fill the defined length, null space is added to a Text Varying attribute value as expansion padding. The amount of null space is controlled by the UPDATE qualities of a Text Varying data type, shown in Table 2.
Table 2: Text Varying UPDATE qualities
System 1032 records are stored in data blocks. All Text Varying (TV) attributes are stored separately
from their record in a structure called a data cluster in a separate set of data blocks. Text Varying attribute data blocks can be stored either in the DMS file or externally. The values for a Text Varying attribute in a data cluster are a contiguous list of data and structures.
A dataset record can contain zero or more attributes of each Text Varying class. Figure 1 illustrates a record with two small and two large Text Varying attributes. Note that all small Text Varying attributes in the record are stored in a single structure forming a set, whereas each large Text Varying attribute is stored in a separate structure.
Part two of this article on System 1032 Text attributes, titled Applying System 1032 Text attributes, will appear in the January issue of CCAPRINT. Part two provides questions and answers about Text attributes, along with a case study.
Announcing the VLDB Summit
Have you thought about attending the next VLDB Summit? At last year's conference, for which CCA was a "Gold Sponsor," Leonard Gradus, Model 204 Chief Product Architect, gave a presentation.
The theme for 1998 is scalability, and the VLDB Summit is "where you can learn how to manage scalable data warehouses, data marts, and high-performance databases - up into the terabytes."
The conference offers technical sessions, case studies, and visionary keynotes from industry leaders, focused on scalability up into the terabyte region and beyond.
At this VLDB Summit, the winners of the 1998 VLDB Survey will be announced.
The VLDB Summit will be held on March 4-7, 1998 at the Beverly Hilton, 9876 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, CA, 90210; phone: 310-247-7777.
For more information, see the Database Summit Series Web site:
http://www.dbsummit.com
IMPACT'98
It's time to start planning for IMPACT'98. This year the conference will be held at the Hyatt Regency Miami Hotel in Miami, Florida. The conference will open at the end of May/beginning of June. Set that time aside to ensure that you can attend!
Copyright © 2008 Computer Corporation of America. All right reserved. Published in the United States of America.
Contact CCA Webmaster Copyright 2008
