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In our fast-paced, modern, development environments, the old data
processing methodologies are disappearing. Large, up-front design and
development techniques can no longer meet the delivery requirements of
today's fast-paced, rapidly changing, user demands and competitive
pressures. Like it or not, MultiValue shops need to embrace the concepts of
both parallel and agile development.
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2011 was an interesting year. We saw technical innovation, new services,
and a number of changes in the overall landscape. So what will 2012 bring?
Nobody can know the future, but here are the best guesses of one of our
contributing authors.
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The greenscreen went the way of the dodo bird. Desktop GUIs may be
sufficient for in-house employees, but they do not provide ready access for
your customers. A well-designed customer-facing website is an absolute
requirement in today's business environment (at least according to your
customers). But now, even that is considered insufficient. Customers demand
access by mobile devices. Perhaps this new tool can help ease your pain.
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With the introduction of U2 Replication and complimenting features,
UniVerse v11.1 now offers a scalable, robust, feature-rich environment for a
24x7x365 operation for any size of business, with the addition of real-time
interoperability with other databases.
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In case you have been asleep the last few years, let us fill you in on some
important news. The Web has taken over. In order to meet your customers'
demands and stay competitive, the data in your MultiValuebased applications
must be accessible by Web technologies. While there are a number of fine
products in the MultiValue world to allow you to do this, if you are willing
to get your hands dirty with a little bit of programming, you can accomplish
a lot of this with tools readily available to you as open source.
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There are times when doing reports when you need to sort your values into
weeks. Most people would end up writing a program to do this, but that is
not necessary.
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Before we explore this question, let me get one thing out of the way — the
obligatory New Year's resolution.
I will not write controversial column titles.
There. Done. And all in keeping with my tradition of starting the new year
off with a burst of productivity by simultaneously making and breaking my
New Year's resolution.
With that out of the way, let's return to the question. Who cares if
MultiValue survives? I don't.
Oh my, I can already hear the scraping of sharpening stones on steel, the
squawking of fowl, and smell the odor of tar being heated in the pots. I
should hasten to explain myself before it becomes necessary for me to go on
Amazon.com and place an order for large quantities of engine degreaser and
burn ointment.
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Big Data has been a hot topic lately. Since it really is not clear what it
is, or how to Big Data applies to us, I figured I'd add my two cents on the
topic.
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It's the end of the year — time to relax, family enjoyment, gift giving,
and time to start planning for the year 2012.
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When migrating a MultiValue application from one platform to another,
especially from an older legacy platform to one that is more modern, the
major goals are to simply get it done, get it working, and get it working
correctly. Too often, however, we forget that the new platform may provide
capabilities that can give us a dramatic improvement in the performance of
our application. Replacing or supplementing application-based
cross-referencing with system-supplied indexing is one of those areas to be
considered.
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Dull, monospaced type, text-only reports usually provide the necessary
information and get the job done. But just like the antiquated green screen
programs, the appearance of these reports invokes a negative reaction from
both users and management, creating an impression of obsolescence in an
otherwise robust application. UniVerse and UniData users have a number of
options for modernizing these reports, one of the newest of which comes from
their database supplier, Rocket Software.
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As you begin to develop webbased MultiValue applications using a browser as
the preferred user interface, one of the first changes in your thinking
process has to be how your application communicates with the user. Unlike a
traditional dedicated connection between user and server, web-based
applications must deal with an ongoing series of non-persistent connections.
How does your application know what you and the user were talking about a
minute or two ago? Using the built-in capabilities of PHP, this article
explores some of the issues of such session management.
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For many departments, the end of the year provides a time to take a look at
the budgets and make use of any leftover funds. Of course, we do not want to
be spending money just to spend it. Here are some ideas of some high-return
ways to do that spend down.
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In these articles have discussed various ways of sending e-mail, both plain
text, HTML-based, and multipart containing both. This last part in this
series on Sending E-mail from MultiValue applications discusses the topic
and techniques for including attachments.
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If you are migrating from another MultiValue system to Caché, an
introduction to some key terminology differences would be useful.
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There is an oft quoted saying supposedly from Mao Tse-tung. "There is great
chaos under heaven — the situation is excellent."
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I need your help in getting the message out that MultiValue is a modern,
robust, solution-oriented platform that works well in a multi-system,
mainstream environment.
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For decades, MultiValue applications have followed the model of having an
always active, persistent connection to the server. This worked well when we
had control over the connection, primarily by using a dedicated cable to a
serial RS-232 port physically located on a board in the machine. Then came
networks, where everything is dynamic and out of our control. Yet in 2011,
how many of our MultiValue application still stick to trying to emulate the
old persistent connection model of the last century?
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Useful Tips on Migrating from Legacy PICK Your system sends up certain red
flags when its performance has degraded. These signals might include missing
your maintenance windows, users complaining about slow system response
times, or unreasonably high system maintenance fees. Perhaps your customers
are saying the application needs modernization, but the programming backlog
is six months and growing. How do you solve these problems? Replace your
legacy PICK system!
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In the early days of e-mail, text was King. If you dared use that horrible,
evil, Microsoft Outlook mailer and sent HTML-based e-mail, you had better be
wearing asbestos underwear, because you were going to get flamed. Today,
HTML e-mail is the norm for all large businesses (at least in the USA), and
the text-only pundits are considered to be somewhat Luddite. Then came
mobile devices with small, hard to read screen sizes. What to do? What to
do? Enter the realm of multipart html/text e-mail.
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Although there are still concerns with Cloud Computing — data privacy,
guaranteed service levels, etc. — it appears that the Cloud is here to stay.
So what will it take to be able to deploy your MultiValue applications in
the Cloud? (Hint — you are almost there already.)
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UniVerse has file triggers which can be used to call a subroutine whenever
a new record is added, changed, or deleted from a file so that the change to
the database can be recorded in an audit trail for IT governance and
compliance requirements. But full blown triggers come with a certain amount
of performance overhead. For simple auditing, using indexing suboutines with
a new system variable available at release 11.1 is a lighter weight
alternative.
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Interacting with delimited file structures for import and export is very
important within your enterprise software. Comma Separated Values format is
the most common.
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If you haven't already read Nathan Rector's From the Inside column this
issue, I would strongly suggest you turn to the front of the magazine and do
so. He is requesting help in getting the word out that MultiValue is alive
and well and quite able to tackle your modern application requirements. It
is also very capabile of fitting into a "mainstream" IT shop having a number
of different platforms working together. But as long as there are only a
handful of us who write articles or blog entries about the kinds of problems
we have solved using our various MultiValue platforms and the techniques we
used to do it, as a community we are going to continue to appear to be much
smaller than we really are. Whereas other platforms have dozens of writers
publishing articles for various magazines, journals, and newsletters, in the
MultiValue world it seems like you see the same bylines over and over. Not
that there is anything wrong with seeing certain writers consistently
producing articles! But when those are the only writers you see, it gives
the impression that there must not be very many people using this thing,
otherwise you would see a lot more people writing about it and discussing
it. I think he did an excellent job explaining some of the issues and
shooting down some of the myths about what it takes to write an article. Now
I would like to add a couple of thoughts then share with you an idea about
how to make the process even less daunting.
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Most companies have ERP needs that are unique to their particular business.
When a "standard" ERP package does not fit well with accepted industry
practices or company business processes, you seem to have two choices —
customize and enhance the software or change the way that you do business to
match the package. The first can be difficult, time-consuming, and
expensive. The second can force you into doing things in a way that actually
complicates your workflow and raises expenses. It may even hurt your
competitive advantages. Find out how this company stepped "outside the box"
and solved one of their ERP needs with inexpensive equipment, internal
developers, and open source software.
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It is the time of year that I start planning for the next Spectrum
conference. If you haven't seen the ad for the 2012 Spectrum, it will be Apr
2nd-5th in West Palm Beach, FL. We are having it at the same venue as the
2011 conference, so if you are a golfer, make sure you bring your clubs.
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Breakthrough applications are solutions that dominate markets, destroying
the competition by providing unique functionality. Of course, creating these
breakthrough applications may require additional skills and technologies.
With the MultiValue developer in mind, this article explores the
characteristics and requirements to produce a breakthrough application.
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For almost 30 years, Telnet has been the primary way that users log into
and access their MultiValue applications and data. It has been a good
workhorse, but as with most tools, there comes a time when what has worked
well for many years no longer meets the modern requirements of security and
reliability. Is it time to retire telnet? If so, where do we go from here?
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When we hear the word "creative," we tend to think of musicians, authors,
visual artists, and the like. Although many members of the Information
Technology community consider themselves to be, and may actually have
degrees in, Computer Science, Software Engineering, or Networks, we have
more in common in our work needs and habits with the artists than is first
apparent. Managers of these group of people are advised to understand and
remember this.
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Continuing the discussion of interfacing MultiValue programs with e-mail,
this part of the series of articles discusses talking directly to an SMTP
server by using sockets. Although the actual details of opening, writing to,
and reading from a socket differ from platform to platform, when you have
made connection, the SMTP dialogue is remarkably straightforward.
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The address is a key piece of information in anyone's database, but it can
be extremely hard to validate, and due to free form input, even harder to
search.
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Unless this is only the first or second of these columns you have read, you
are already aware that one of my hot buttons is getting rid of the green
screens in our MultiValue applications. I have repeatedly made the point
that having the most visible part of our applications using an antiquated
approach to user interfaces is not just an embarrassment — it is probably a
major contributing factor to why non-technical upper management kicks the
MultiValue system to the curb (and the MultiValue developers along with it)
and replaces it with something more "mainstream." If it looks like a
dinosaur, waddles like a dinosaur, grunts like a dinosaur, well then, it
must be a dinosaur.
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This article will shows SUBROUTINE (stored procedures) code for reading and
writing to Linux/Unix files from D3.
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This article will shows SUBROUTINE (stored procedures) code writing to
Windows files from D3.
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This article will shows SUBROUTINE (stored procedures) code
writing to Windows files from UniVerse or UniData.
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This article will shows SUBROUTINE (stored procedures) code for reading and
writing to Linux/Unix files from UniVerse or UniData.
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If the idea that the green screen is dead and has been replaced by GUI is
new to you, you must be reading International Spectrum magazine for the
first time. Toss into that Ajax, Web 2.0, Cloud Computing, etc. and you have
an entirely new set of customer expectations that you must meet in order to
remain competitive in today's modern technology world. This article
introduces a new series and explains why and how it will explore this topic.
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In the first two articles in this series, you learned how to construct an
e-mail with the required header lines and a body. You were then introduced
to SMTP using Microsoft's Internet Information Server. Now we take a look at
the granddaddy of Internet mail — the venerable Sendmail.
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Reading and writing OS files is very important in the new hybrid systems we
have to write these days. Most of our applications are pretty
self-contained,and don't need to interact with programs or applications
outside the MV environment. But that is slowly changing.
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On a recent flight, I was flipping through a copy of The Economist
magazine. Not my usual entertainment material, but a guy has to have
something to read until they allow him to turn his Kindle back on. I spotted
a small article titled "Spare us the e-mail yada-yada." It was subtitled
"Automatic e-mail footers are not just annoying. They are legally useless."
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User Group Members Wanted!
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Planning It is human nature to want to avoid thinking about painful things.
But when disaster strikes, not having any plans on how to react or recover
can vastly limit our chances of survival — either personally or as a
business. This article explores some of the issues of planning business
survival after a catastrophe. If you are like most of us, you will find some
things that had never occurred to you to think about.
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As we did last year, we decided it would be more interesting to you to hear
what attendees at the conference had to say rather than what we thought of
it. In these three interviews we hear the opinions of both seasoned
MultiValue developers and a newcomer to our database.
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With the cost of disk space continuing to fall, does anybody except the
very largest shops worry about the cost of data storage anymore? Maybe yes,
maybe no. It still depends on the circumstances. But although network
bandwidth continues to increase, there is still a price to be paid — not
just in gigabytes transmitted but also in things like the hidden cost of
lost productivity due to network congestion. This article suggests some data
compression options, and it includes ready-to-run source code in MultiValue
Basic.
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Welcome to the International Spectrum 2011 Conference!
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It's a small world and getting smaller, especially thanks to the Internet
and web-enabled applications. Whether due to a business expanding into
international markets or acquisitions by, or partnering with, foreign
companies, many applications are finding a need to be multilingual, not just
MultiValue. So how do you represent the different non-English characters?
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Gone are the days when the Data Processing department was both keeper and
defender of the data and parceled it out to users on green bar reports where
they could look but not touch. Today's users insist that data be presented
to them in such a manner that they can manipulate it, summarize it, use it,
and even lose it. This provides the modern IT department with a new set of
challenges.
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Part 1 of this series of articles showed you how to construct an e-mail,
including the necessary items in the header and body. So now you have it,
what do you do with it? There are a variety of ways to actually send e-mail.
We start by introducing you to SMTP using Microsoft's Internet Information
Server.
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Many MultiValue accounting packages lack the GUI interface modern users
demand or other features that are considered to be mandatory by anyone who
has used a modern accounting application. One option is to replace it with
an off-the-shelf commodity accounting package and share data between it and
the MultiValue system running the core business functions. Part 1 dealt with
getting data from MultiValue to QB. Now we go in the other direction.
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While computer and data security is a large and complex subject, it is
disconcerting how many MultiValue systems do not even take the most
fundamental precautions to protect user data from unauthorized access. Just
a couple of straightforward techniques can prevent that kid on the coffee
shop WiFi from stealing your access codes and walking through your system at
will.
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The green screen may be dead, but graphical user interfaces bring with them
their own set of issues. Because of their flexibility, a set of GUIbased
programs in an application written by different programmers, each with their
own opinion and style, can be even more difficult to understand, use, and
navigate than the old green screens. But do user interface standards appear
magically?
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I see QR codes.
But unlike the ghosts of dead people, these things are present in our
external reality. And I'm not alone. Lots of people see them, including the
attendees at the 2011 International Spectrum conference. You see them too.
Look up at the top of this page. See that square checkerboard thing? That's
a QR code.
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Windows PPC and Windows Mobile devices from Symbol and Intermec are used
quite often enterprise warehousing. They are rugged devices and give you a
wide range of development options to interface with your MultiValue
database. While you can write a GUI application to take advantage of all
the devices features, it takes time. You can create a proof of concept, and
a full blow production application using a telnet client for the PPC.
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This error is generated from the D3/NT 7.x RPC Client library. D3/NT 7.x
was designed to take advantage of domain RPC calls to help find the MDS
server. While this made setup, installs, and other applications faster to
implement, the new securities implemented in Windows sometimes interferes.
Error: NE2320
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