Archive for September, 2007

One-on-One Meetings with CA Experts at EDGEucate 2007

Do you have a specific question on a product issue that you would like to discuss with CA Gen experts? You can have the exclusive opportunity to meet with CA Gen experts in a private 20 minute one-on-one meeting on Wednesday, October 31. Ask your questions and get answers. Registration begins Monday, October 29, on a first-come-first-serve basis. To pre-book your appointment, please visit the registration desk at EDGEucate 2007 to sign up for a preferred time and list the nature of your meeting. We will contact the appropriate CA Gen experts and then reconfirm the meeting with you.

Yahoo! Gentalk News widget.

Get the latest Gen-related news on your desktop, by downloading the Gentalk News Widget”>Yahoo Gentalk Widget. You’ll need also download the Yahoo! Widget framework here first.

The Widget has been tested on a Windows desktop only, but should work on Macintosh desktops too.

The widget will initially link to the combined RSS feeds of Gentalk, IET, EDGE and Duick.com, but others will be added later, with no need to download a new version of the widget!

New versions will, however be made available with different options, and different features in the near future !

New EDGE Podcast

Check out the new EDGE podcast here – it’s about the EDGE Advocacy program and DARs, with Rob Jasper and Mike Amudsen, who’ll be presenting at EDGEucate 2007.

Performance tuning with Gen – thoughts…

Does Gen offer enough facilities to allow performance tuning of its applications ?

This loosely links back to one of my earlier posts on database independance, I suppose. Most of the performance issues that I have come across seem to be with database access. I know that a lot of performance issues are to do with badly written code, such as calculations done many times within a loop, that only need to be done once etc…, but aside from removing that sort of stuff, which, really can be considered the first stage of performance tuning of any app – not just Gen ones, what more could Gen offer ?
Well, I suppose that from a point of view of hacking code to modify SQL statements to dump their execution plans to a flat file, then it would be nice to have the ability, not only to generate with trace, but to “generate with stats” – which would, at the very least, switch “explain plans” on for all SQL statements. Also, those stats could contain “timing points” which could be inserted (possibly as new statements ???) into the code, and enabled through the “generate with stats” approach. These timing points would dump time information to a file, so that application engineers could see what was going on, and how long it took.

I understand that any collection of statistics modifies the way an application works, but used carefully could aid the performance engineer no end.

Disclaimer:
This kind of approach should NOT be used without the safety net of other methods of performance tuning – proper database design, proper configuration of machines etc etc!!!!

BLOBS and CLOBS – should Gen support them?

BLOBs and CLOBs – do they have a place in Gen ?

Thinking about what datatypes Gen supports, they are the “normal” ones, but BLOBs and CLOBs are not “normal” – so should they be supported.

I suppose what is meant by “normal” is more readily described by “traditional” – in that the newer datatypes were not around in the early days of database development and are not widespread in implementation.

BLOBS and CLOBS, however seem to be implemented in more mainstream databases now – so the question arises – should Gen support them?

Aside from any technical constraints/difficulties etc. with the implementation, there is the view that CLOBS and BLOBS do not actually belong in a relational database – they should be in other types of application data store, with adapter-type technology to get at them.

But, for the sake of this discussion, lets say that they do belong in an RDBMS. If this is the case, then anyone who wants to consider extending or implemnting from scratch an application which needs binary data (images, sound etc etc) would therefore not be able to choose Gen as a primary construction tool – and have to resort to other technologies to get at image-style data (potentially from the same database – if the target supports it).

So, in my opinion, the reading and writing of BLOBs and CLOBs to databases that support them should be supported, so as to extend the range of application types that Gen can construct.