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Calling all Sybase DBA's
We would like to extend an invite to join our new free community... The Sybase DBA Development Program...
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Mobility Platforms
I've just posted a blog on my personal site regarding the topic of Mobile Platforms. This space is heating up with many players vying to be the Windows of the Mobile world as the OS player including Windows Mobile, Blackberry, iPhone OS, Android, Symbian, LiMo, Brew, etc.. With the huge number of the devices that will profilerate (already at around 3.3 billion) and huge revenue opportunities this seems to be the next big battle ground.
Few new plays in this space recently:
- Android comes out with its first phone and first looks provides a very open platform for developers to extend functionality.
- Symbian taken over Nokia essentially rendering motorola and other handset manufacturers to choose their own course although
- they've said it will be open sourced.
- Heard recently about LiMo foundation to deliver low foot print Linux.
Techwave 2008 - It's all good baby!!
You know it's a good sign when the food starts tasting much better :) That is how I compare year after year. For some reason, I personally felt a lot of energy and optimism from attendees and had great traffic at my booth. More than that, there were many great questions from the folks attending the conference, which is always good.
I managed to stay reasonably busy in the SUP booth with good traffic although there was a lack of chairs. We were positioned next to the various techathlon events that were being held and I managed to show off my non-existent footie skills.
I'm excited getting closer to release date for SUP. It's been an excellent group effort to get it out considering we had teams in Paris, Pune, Singapore, Shanghai, Xian, Dublin, London, etc. Hardest was coordinating conference calls within the teams. Techwave gave me a chance to start putting the message out with real demos and there were some good questions about the product that we've also been thinking about and it validated some of our future direction. The developer tools message was well received by the audience and they felt that would simplify their development efforts a lot.
And I did have some fun too. WHIVSIV :)
Was'SUP : The tooling story - Visual Studio or Eclipse; your choice, we support!!
Once upon a time the developers kingdom got split into two provinces, Visual Studio (Windows Platform) and Eclipse (Windows and every other platform) based on various factors like corporate IT decisions, deployment environment, language familiarity, etc. There were some other splinter provinces like (Netbeans, etc.) which continued to have a decent community but not large enough to cause any trouble.
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Was'SUP - No, I'm not that cool, it's still geek speak!!
You are going to hear a lot of this feeble attempt at humor from the resident geeks at Techwave (I guess we can exclude the marketing folks as they are pretty cool). If you have been attending the past few years of Techwave or visited Sybase home page or may be have attended any one of the presentations over the last few years, there has been a lot of chatter about Unwired Enterprise Platform.
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PocketBuilder Demos hit the streets!
Now that the latest EBF of PocketBuilder is available, I can say with pride that my PocketBuilder Demos have hit the street.
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The 3G iPhone Announcement – Still NO Native MMS
Let's talk about the iPhone some more. Over the last, almost 1 year, this little device has done a great deal for the mobile industry. Love it or hate it, it has had an impact. In less than one year, the iPhone has captured around 19% of the smartphone market and has done more than any other device to make mobile Internet browsing mainstream.
On June 9th, Steve Jobs unveiled the new 3G iPhone at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco. This new incarnation of the iPhone will be available, starting on July 11th with AT&T in the USA. I won’t spend a lot of time here listing the new features, but I should note that the 3G iPhone STILL does not currently have a native MMS client. It is still missing things like copy & paste, Flash, Java, and video support – features that most of the other smartphones in the marketplace, support natively. I should point out that, thanks to the iPhone SDK, we should expect Sun to make available a Java Virtual Machine for the iPhone, sometime this summer. Additionally, we should expect Adobe to release Flash for the iPhone as well.
CNET provided live coverage of the 3G iPhone announcement along with details of 3rd party applications and the application developer’s toolkit. Another well-respected industry blog at Engadget gives a nice overview. Note all of the blogger comment complaints about lack of MMS.
There is now a 3rd party MMS client called “Swirly MMS” that is making some news in the blogspace. It is currently a very rough application(can only send, not receive) that one can download. Still, it is a start.
Recall from previous blogs; if I send an MMS to an iPhone user, the recipient will receive an SMS stating that they have an MMS to retrieve from an AT&T (and likely other operator) web site – a terrible user experience reminiscent of the old days when most handsets didn’t support native MMS. Hopefully, this will change
Despite the lack of true MMS on the iPhone, MMS traffic, in general, continues to grow organically and is now approaching 30% of the subscriber population sending at least 1 MMS per month in many markets.
TechWave Registration is now open!
Join us Aug. 4 – 8 at the Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino in Las Vegas, NV... for the 10th Annual Sybase User Training and Solutions Conference.
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New PocketBuilder Demos
I am finally adapting my PocketBuilder Demo applications, so they can be included in the PocketBuilder DVD.
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CTIA 2008 - "The WiMAX Show"
After quite a bit of thought, I can still safely say that this conference had a definite “theme” about it and that was WiMAX. I think that a great deal of the heavy WiMAX presence was due to the WiMAX Forum’s strong promotion of the technology among companies at the conference. In fact, the forum provided a journey of sorts (called the “Walk of WiMAX” Tour), across almost 100 forum-member companies in the exhibition hall. The WiMAX Forum sponsored the WiMAX Lounge with live demonstrations of services in a strategically placed booth outside the main entrances to the exhibition halls in the convention center. I did see a nice demonstration of the capabilities that will be available, later this year, via Sprint’s XOMH service. So whether you needed antennas, WiMAX modems, consumer devices, USB dongles, base stations, testing/measurement instruments, or backhaul solutions for WiMAX, this was your show to attend.
I like WiMAX – and am looking forward to available deployments – with the new 700 MHz frequency bands, mostly allocated to AT&T and Verizon, the technology can certainly resolve some of the “last mile” issues – especially in more rural areas where broadband access is certainly hard to come by (e.g. see my previous blog on how I have to access the Internet). The WiMAX Forum even has a position paper on the new 700 MHz spectrum and WiMAX. The Forum suggests that by 2009, WiMAX will be 700 MHz band ready (right now, WiMAX is available for frequency bands between 2300 MHz and 3800 MHz). The bottom line is that a 700 MHz deployment of WiMAX in areas with lesser subscriber density can result in more broadband coverage and options, with fewer towers and larger cell sizes.
While WiMAX dominated the 4G technology, they were certainly not alone. An almost equal number of companies were demonstrating and promoting LTE (Long Term Evolution) equipment and services. LTE is seen as the 4G technology for most GSM and CDMA based networks, although I’m not sure how it would be in advancing fixed broadband around the world. LTE certainly has more nomadic capabilities (currently) than WiMAX.
As the industry slowly advances towards an more “open” IP-based mobile ecosystem, I do believe that we will finally start to see various services that will require more than just unfettered or unmanaged internet access. Of course, if the current 800-900 operators or so have it their way, they will never become just simple ISPs or “dump pipes” as they are sometimes called. Instead, there will even be more services that require some level of “management” – of things like dedicated bandwidth, latency thresholds, and of course, presence. The presence concept (or availability of a subscriber to accept one or more types of communications) will slowly expand from the Instant Messaging world of today to virtually all types of communications tomorrow. When most of the world is running 3G, 3.5G, and 4G data networks, I think you will start to see IMS begin to take hold to manage these capabilities.
But I digress – back to the show for a few more tidbits –
The handset vendors were all there in force. All except, Google (just like in Barcelona). I cannot understand WHY, why a company such as Google, who wants to play in this space; who has announced a major mobile platform (Android) does not have a strong presence – even just with information on their vision of the mobile ecosystem – and maybe some demonstrations of prototypes with Android. They could so be a popular and educational spot at this conference.
Microsoft announced Mobile Windows 6.1, which should be available soon and all 6.0 Mobile Windows users can upgrade. This will include a new Mobile Explorer browser with many features that look to me, to be very similar to Opera Mini.
Samsung, Nokia, LG and others all now have, what some to perceive as “iPhone killers” – still not much of an iPhone presence at the show, except for the AT&T booth. Touch screens are now definitely in vogue, as are fashion phones – the LG Prada, Samsung Giorgio Armani, Adidas and Bang and Olufsen, to name a few.
Finally, one of the more innovative products I saw at the show was a shoe (yes, a shoe) from a company called ID Conex. They create GPS and GSM enabled footwear, targeted for very specific vertical markets from military to care for the memory impaired.
With over 40,000 visitors and over 1100 exhibitors, this was truly a strong showing this year. Suffice it to say, there was little evidence of an economic downturn as this industry continually refreshes and expands.
Selling the Future Promise (instead of Today’s Product)One of the things I’ve learned over the years is that customers and partners will often express a desire for something you don’t have. Many have laughed at the archetypical sales response of saying “yes, we can do that”. Engineering types will often take the exact opposite approach by promoting [...] (More...) Remembering
Today is Remembrance Day in Canada and the UK. Today is the 90th anniversary of the end of World War I. On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of every year, we Canadians remember the men and women who gave their lives in conflicts around the world for [...] (More...) Light Bulbs and Data SyncData synchronization cannot simply be an add-on at the end of a development project. It must be designed in from the beginning. In many of my previous posts, I have promoted a process that we call Data Driven Mobile Application design. I firmly believe that organizations must think about all [...] (More...) Synchronization MattersOur team has recently been in contact with a new customer using our new UltraLiteJ for Blackberry product. The customer provides mobile solutions for field service technicians. While I don’t usually post self congratulatory marketing type material here, I beg your indulgence this once. Here’s what they had to say [...] (More...) Is It Done?Today is the last day of our quarter. For the last couple weeks, I have heard the question many times: “Is it done?”
The “IT” in this case is a new product option for UltraLite that will be useful in certain circumstances for some of our US Government accounts.
The answer to this [...] (More...) Bundling Third Party Code - Part 2In my previous posting, I discussed some of the issues and procedures that we go through within the SQL Anywhere team when considering the use of 3rd party components within SQL Anywhere.
After the bundling of a 3rd party component is approved, there are still two key considerations for our team.
Legal considerations
The ability [...] (More...) Bundling Third Party Code - Part 1– prior to integration of code
One of my tasks as Senior Director of Engineering is to keep a handle on all the 3rd party components we bundle or include in the SQL Anywhere product.
I am sure that our engineering team is not unique in the software industry in looking for ways to speed up development [...] (More...) |
Try the New SQL Anywhere Database Monitoring ToolI would like to invite everyone to be involved in the beta testing of our
brand new graphical monitoring tool. The SQL Anywhere Monitor is a
browser-based administration tool that provides you with information about
the health and availability of SQL Anywhere databases and MobiLink servers.
The SQL Anywhere Monitor collects metrics and performance data from
databases and MobiLink servers [...] (More...) SQL Anywhere 11.0.0 AnnouncementsSybase Techwave is happening this week in Las Vegas. SQL Anywhere has made 3 major announcements:
Sybase iAnywhere Announces Availability of SQL Anywhere 11
Version 11 has lots of cool new features. Check out the Top 10 Cool New Features in SQL Anywhere 11
Next we have Sybase iAnywhere Targets Web Developer Community with New [...] (More...) Something Missing From our Docs? Let us know.We recently published our new DocComment Xchangewebsite, built on SQL Anywhere.
DocCommentXchange is a community site for viewing and discussing SQL Anywhere documentation.
You can Use DocCommentXchange to:
View documentation
Check for clarifications users have made to sections of documentation.
Add your own comments and examples to clarify the documentation
Improve documentation for all users in future releases.
We [...] (More...) Where Have I Been?I have not had a lot of time to post lately. Mostly due to
1) Getting everything done for the release of SQL Anywhere v 11.
2) My upcoming wedding at the end of August.
Regular posts should begin again soon…
(More...) You Want to Store How Much Data????SQL Anywhere ships a sample called instest (found in the Samples\SQLAnywhere\PerformanceInsert directory of your SQL Anywhere install) which allows you to experiment on insert performance for SQL Anywhere. However, it is important to think things through before picking requirements out of the air.
In speaking with potential customers, they often ask us whether we can [...] (More...) Accessing Web Services From SQL AnywhereI’ve been playing with SQL Anywhere’s support for web services. What is particularly cool is that you can call out to (or consume) a web service right from the database server using a stored procedure. Since I have been playing with blogs, and setting up rss, I wondered if I could consume RSS [...] (More...) At last the spammers found me…Well, I am in the middle of updating the blog to use the “Bad Behaviour” plugin to see if I can cut down on the amount of spam comments I am getting.
Fortunately the work I did to get the blog running on SQL Anywhere in a generic way allowed me to get this plugin up [...] (More...) |
Capacity planning with SQL Anywhere: forthcoming webinarA reminder that I’ll be presenting the last of the SQL Anywhere 11 webinar series, on Capacity Planning with SQL Anywhere, this coming Thursday 20 November 2008 at 11am EST. Here is a link to the Sybase registration page for the series; if at all possible please register beforehand.
In the talk, I’ll outline a methodology [...] (More...) Thinking on your feetSoon after becoming a graduate student at the University of Waterloo, I teamed up with friend and fellow graduate student Darrell Raymond — now a Principal Consultant at The Gateway Group here in Waterloo — and started a weekly Friday afternoon seminar series for graduate students in the Data Structuring Group. The idea was to [...] (More...) Webinar: Full text search in SQL Anywhere 11A reminder to all that I’ll be delivering a webinar on Full Text Search in SQL Anywhere 11 this Thursday, November 13 at 11:00am. Here is a link to the registration form for the webinar; if at all possible please sign up beforehand. In the talk, I’ll be outlining the support for full text search [...] (More...) Tomorrow is Remembrance DayI’d like to remind everyone that tomorrow, November 11, is Remembrance Day in Canada, Britain, and other countries around the world. It is an opportunity to reflect on the horror of war and to remember the sacrifice made by so many Canadians in the wars and peacekeeping missions of this and the past century.
Remembrance Day [...] (More...) The state of TPC-E - part deuxRecently, Charles Levine of Microsoft posted a response on the SQL Server performance blog, entitled TPC-E: Raising the bar on OLTP Performance, to my article from 3 October entitled The State of TPC-E. In this post, I’d like to respond to some of the statements Mr. Levine made in his commentary, which are indented below:
TPC-C [...] (More...) Computing Community Consortium offers Research Highlight of the WeekThe Computing Research Association and the Computing Community Consortium are now offering a weekly highlight of, in their opinion, the most promising new result in Computer Science.
Their first offering is a summary of a new algorithm for network routing, or “what’s the best way to get to there from here”:
A new algorithm developed by [...] (More...) P != NP?This latest attempt at the holy grail of theoretical Computer Science, a proof that the complexity classes P and NP are equal (or not), caused a bit of a stir around the office this week. It’s not only that as Computer Scientists we are interested in the problem, but also because one of our former [...] (More...) |
J.D. Was HereJ.D. Was Here
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