NEMUG Newsletter
April 2003, Articles
Board Meetings
NEMUG Executive Board Meetings are open to anyone to attend. Your presence and views are welcome at any time. The meetings are held on the second Monday of even-numbered months, at the office of Henry Elliott in Wellesley. We try to get started at 6:00 pm. Dates for the next few meetings are:
- 9 June '03
- 11 August '03
- 13 October '03
- 8 December '03
If you are planning to attend, please let a board member know in advance, as we provide food and eat as we work, and need to be sure we have enough for everyone. The complete address for the meetings is:
Henry Elliott and Company Inc.
One Washington St. Suite 208
Wellesley, MA 02481
From the Chair
This month I'd like to highlight two decisions that the board has made. We arrived at these by consensus at our meeting on April 14, 2003. Don't forget that you are welcome to attend board meetings and contribute to our discussions. The next board meeting will be on Monday, June 9, 2003, 6:00 pm, at the offices of Henry Elliott, One Washington Street, Wellesley.
- SATURDAY SCHOOL - As promised, we're going to hold another learning event, so save the date! On June 7th we will meet at 10 am at Eclipsys to learn how to port a relational database (SQLServer, Access) to M. Bring your laptop if you wish; equipment will be provided, however, so if you don't have one, that's ok. There will be room for about 20 people, and we will ask you to sign up if you plan to attend. More details will be available at the May meeting, so be sure to attend. You may sign up at that time, or email Ben Hurley (bhurley1@partners.org) to register. We will send you details, including directions, via return email.
- NEW MEETING LOCATION - The board has agreed to pursue arrangements to hold our meetings at the Wellesley Gateway Building, 93 Worcester Road, where we held the dinner meeting in January. For those who were not present that night, it's at the northwest corner of the intersection of routes 128 (I-95) and 9. Our aim is to begin holding meetings at this location with the September meeting. Watch for more details. We think that it will be easier for many of you to attend.
We're always on the lookup for interesting topics for our meetings. There are only six each year, so we try to find areas of interest to as many of you as possible. Please share your ideas on what would be a great topic or whom you'd like to hear speak with any board member. You can reach me atmdpaterno@partners.org. We appreciate your input.
Elections for the 2003-2004 year will be held at the May 13th meeting. Just as a reminder, here is the slate being presented by the Nominating Committee. Additional nominations may be made from the floor at the meeting. Those elected will begin their terms of office in July.
| Chair (1 year) | Marilyn D. Paterno |
|---|---|
| Vice-Chair (1 year) | Heidi Pape-Laird |
| Secretary (1 year) | Larry Van Cura |
| Treasurer (1 year) | Ben Bishop |
| At Large (2 years, 2 open seats) | Aviel Klausner |
| At Large (2 years, 2 open seats) | Anthony Pilozzi |
| At Large (1 year) | Joe Crisafulli * |
*This will fill out the remainder of Ken Wagner's term at his request. Marilyn D. Paterno, Chair
March Meeting: A Report from Devcon 2003
Anthony Pilozzi recapped Caché DEVCON 2003, Las Vegas.
Anthony Pilozzi has been working at Intersystems as a Service Executive for sixteen months. He assists large accounts in transition when they need oversight of Intersystems resources.
Anthony presented some of the slides from DEVCON 2003. He discussed Intersystems as a company, then technology and the future of Intersystems including Rapid Application Development, Security, Application Integration or Ensemble, and Performance and Scalability. Next he gave two demonstrations. One was Basic in Caché and the other Debugging in Caché.
Intersystems
Intersystems is a financially stable global company. Most of their business is through other businesses. They have 100,000 systems in 88 countries. DEVON had representatives from 16 countries. Intersystems has about 800 business partners. Downloads of Caché have increased to 20,000 in this past year. Intersystems makes most money after the application is deployed. Development brings very little of the profit. Recently Intersystems displaced the competitor, IBM, to implement a Caché powered IT rollout for a $1.8 billion Kaiser project. Intersystems is growing, the market is flat, and Oracle is dropping in terms of sales.
Technology and future Rapid Application development
A problem with development is the Object/relational mismatch. The challenge is the transformation between logic of object s and traditional database. According to Oracle's development magazine, you could lose 40% of development effort resolving the mismatch. However, Caché has no cost, the view is the same and therefore development can be fast. One Caché application success is a state of art genomic testing system, which progressed from concept to deployment in six months.
What's next for Caché 6? There will be Studio enhancement, .Net and Java connectivity, migration features for relational refugees, mobile device integration, and new development environment choices. The Caché studio is the new IDE for v5. It supports Caché basic and Caché object script. The interface is similar to other visual IDE's. Coming are IntelliSense, java editing, and a performance profiler. There are choices of Caché for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
There will be migration features for relational refugees. They are adding vendor specific syntax for C. They are adding DBLib support for Sybase. There will be high performance for rich connected applications and easy efficient synchronization for disconnected applications. For example hand held devices can reconnect and upload new data. There will be Object/table synchronization and real time OLAP. A full data warehouse on Caché multidimensional cubes are inherently part of the database. There will be mechanisms for updating cube, bulk load.
Security
Intersystems is building security into the internal structure in API calls. They use Kerberos for standardizing security. That authentication process connects to Caché and determines what functions the user can access. The underlying structure is built so that it doesn't have to be redone each time.
Regarding auditing, there is a tamper resistant log built into Caché. System and application events are logged. They are in SQL and security clearance is restricted. Kerberos is supplied by O/S, authenticates identity for each process/session, consistent for all mechanisms, with a single sign on. Roles and role privileges are structured. Signed code may transiently modify roles.
Application Integration
Intersystems has a new product called Ensemble for application integration and end user development. This product serves as messaging to other standards. Every new end user requires integration with existing applications. Every integration project requires new application functionality. Caché will be used to enable the various applications to function together through Ensemble. It is built on Caché. You'll see composite applications, coordinated transactions, management of business process and monitoring of business activity. This will leverage existing applications. Technology adapters might be data sources or old applications, such as SAP and HL7.
The next layer is the abstraction of the message types like text messages, fax, and emails. The messages need to be coordinated and the data has to be moved across machines. Orchestrations include a full spectrum programming/execution environment from high level business process to programmatic logic. Finally storage is built underneath. That is not provided by other vendors. Ensemble permits separate products to work together with common technology. Its strengths are connectivity and powerful abstraction.
Performance and Scalability
Caché produces high performance whether one or 10,000+ users. The Caché box started to have bottlenecks in version 3.2. Caché 4.1 can go up to 12 boxes. Caché 5 scales to 24 boxes.
A study was done comparing the performance in an Online National Telephone directory. Caché was 23 times faster than Oracle in name and street lookup and 4.7 times faster than Oracle doing just a name lookup. Caché used 95% less disk space. Caché updates online. But oracle updates offline with batch index rebuilds. Caché is scalable to 24 and more processor boxes. Others want a multi-server environment. They optimize distributed caching to enable grid computing. Global references per second have been increasing exponentially in the versions of Caché. Users of Caché 3.2 could expect 2,500 global references per second, Caché 4, 19,000, and 8 CPUs and Caché 5 80,000 to 450,000 and 24 CPUs. Enterprise Cache Protocol (ECP) is a new networking technology, dealing with scaling barriers. You can build large architecture using small boxes. Application sever failure is much easier to prevent.
A new index type called Caché Transactional bitmaps increases performance. A test created a million record character index on Caché 4.1 in 1.7 seconds, Caché 5 in 1.48 seconds, and with Caché bitmap .01 seconds. Caché bitmap is extremely fast. Updates occur in Caché 4.1, 2.84 seconds, in Caché 5.0, 2.43 seconds and with bit map 2.34 seconds. There is no performance penalty for new index. To bitmap an age index for a Person database for example you would see a bitstring like this: 0010101010, one bit for each age. In the example, bitmaps consumed 59 % less disk space.
What's next? Intersystems is developing new routine architecture, SQL bit slice indexing and new platforms. They are working with Intel to optimize for 64 bit architectures. They continue to insure high availability. They are working on a browser based tool for system management. They will provide additional tools support, not only Windows, but other vendors, BMC patrol, Veritas, Tivoli, SNMP. They are making enhancements to shadowing.
Two demonstrations - Basic in Caché and Debugging
Anthony gave two demonstrations, but first he showed us the Caché documentation written in Caché on CSP pages. The search capability is terrific. Tutorials, index and table of contents is readily available. Caché Basic documentation is available. Using Basic in addition to M would speed adoption. There is a Basic tutorial, but it actually doesn't teach you Basic, but teaches you M using Basic. The programmer guide is incorporated in the documentation.
Basic Demo:
The routines are named with the .BAS extension, e.g. Basic.bas, personadd.BAS
Do
Println name, " ",age," " ,color
If color ="bloodshot"
If ans="y"
Debugging Demo:
Under View in Studio you can set a Watch window. You set up the project using breakpoints. Go into Project>Settings>Debugging Target and Breakpoints set up. Then go into Debug and hit go.
You can also debug CSP web pages although subsequent information indicates that CSP developers prefer to set globals through the pages on the fly and debug that way.
Type
Run^routine
You attach to a namespace. You can attach remotely also. Attaching also occurs in the Debug menu on the toolbar.
~ submitted by Heidi Pape-Laird