The latest beta release of the IBM Data Server Provider for .NET will offer support for U2 data servers alongside DB2 and Informix Dynamic Server (IDS). Along with the included IBM Database add-ins for Visual Studio 2005 , this offering will provide SQL and XML interfaces to U2 , allowing for seamless integration with Microsoft Server Explorer, support for NLS and Connection Pooling, ZERO programming for Windows, integration with Crystal Reports and a lot more.

If you would be interested in participating in an Early Adoption Program for this technology, please email U2AskUs@us.ibm.com with a subject of IBM.NET Early Adoption Program. This technology will support both UniData and UniVerse, so please let us know which data server you are using.

P2 Energy Solutions announces the release of Excalibur Report Studio (ERS). ERS is a desktop application that will completely transform the way that business users access, analyze and report data out of the Excalibur Energy Management System. Built upon the Microsoft .NET framework, ERS is a tool designed to extract data directly from the UniData database and structure the data in a normalized format, so that third-party reporting packages can be utilized to deliver the information to the end-user and provide greater business intelligence capabilities. As a starting point, ERS is integrated with Crystal Reports® Developer XI from Business Objects. "Crystal Reports is probably the most popular reporting tool on the market," said Mark Eikermann, senior vice president of development for P2 Energy Solutions . "It made perfect sense to choose Crystal as the preferred report writer under which to build ERS."

The new and unique characteristic of ERS is its direct interaction with the UniData database . In the past, companies had external access to UniData using an ODBC access layer. This not only created more complexity, but these tools were confining from a reporting standpoint. Using proprietary technology to transform the data into a normalized view, ERS eliminates the complexity to bridge the gap between UniData and today's popular reporting applications, opening additional opportunities and capabilities to all users. ERS is architected so that knowledge workers can utilize the full capabilities of today's best reporting tools which are richly endowed with charts, graphs and analytical capabilities.

"ERS will be particularly attractive to our customer base for a number of core reasons," says Darrell Jones, executive vice president, P2 Energy Solutions . "The first is the robust flexibility of the product including powerful analytical capabilities, presentation quality appearance of the reports, and multiple report deployment options; the second, a dramatic improvement in speed compared to ODBC access; and third, the reduced amount of maintenance because ERS operates directly on UniData data tables using the native dictionary definitions (including any customer unique dictionary items) which eliminates ODBC schema administration."

The potential of ERS is well recognized by existing Excalibur clients, who are enthusiastic to be on the vanguard and participate in the beta testing scheduled to conclude by July 1. Because ERS is designed to directly access the UniData database, the tool is product agnostic. ERS can be valuable for any application running on UniData, not only Excalibur. "There is nothing like ERS on the market," continued Mark Eikermann. "ERS will work with any application that uses the UniData database which greatly expands the potential market. That said, our first focus is to continue to add value for our Excalibur clients with well thought out research and development efforts."

Execu-Sys, ltd - Positions Available

Experienced UNIDATA/SB+ contractors needed for multiple projects nationwide; any experience with Masterpack, Primac or Epicor software packages a major +. Rate dependent on project-some projects will allow for partial telecommute.

For additional information contact Matt Hart at (800)423-1964 x302 or mh@eslny.com

SENIOR SYSTEMS ANALYST & PROGRAMMER with the Deschutes County Information Technology Dept in Bend, Oregon. Position responsible for defining, analyzing, designing, programming, and implementing computer applications. Duties include but are not limited to, providing application training; and migrating software applications to other platforms, operating systems, and application suites. Four year college degree, preferably in math, computer science, or business; with seven years of progressively responsible experience in project management, systems analysis, and programming environment utilizing the Multi-Valued database and programming language; OR any equivalent combination of education, training, and experience.

SALARY RANGE: $4,442 - $6,079 per month, excellent County benefit pkg.

For further information visit our website @ www.co.deschutes.or.us, or contact the Deschutes County Personnel Dept, Bend, OR @ (541) 388-6553. Deschutes County Application required and accepted UNTIL POSITION HAS BEEN FILLED. For hearing impaired, call TTY/TDD 711. EOE,

The Texas Multi-Value User Group [TEXMUG ] will hold it's first meeting on September 13th, 2007.

Here is your chance to:

• Network with other MV professionals
• Discuss your next big project (or last big project), and ask how others would tackle it.
• Hear about tools others use (good or bad?)
• Discover other MV shops in Texas [area]
• Find out about MV service providers [Vendors] in the area
• Gain salient wisdom from MV evangelists, academicians, kingpins, eggheads, nerds, code crafters, and illuminati
• Express your learned opinion [lore / traditions/ insights] on all things MV and / or IT

Some TEXMUG business we will undertake:

• Elect Interim Officers (Pres, VP, Secretary, ....)
• Discuss what everyone wants / doesn't want in TEXMUG
• Future Topics to discuss / have presentations on, from an MV perspective (by Developers, Managers, Vendors, Researchers)

What: Texas Area Multi-Value Users Group
When: 7pm Thur 9/13/07
Where: Spring Creek Barbeque, 2340 I-20 W. #100, Arlington, Texas 76017
817.467.0553
Who: All Texas Area users of Multi-Value systems (UniVerse,
UniData, D3, Jbase, Arev, OpenInsight, Mentor, Reality, mvBase, PIOpen,
Ultimate & others)
Cost: The price of your supper.

EasyCo LLC unveils "ultra performance" storage solution for enterprise servers.

EasyCo announces the release of its "Managed Flash Technology" storage solution for Linux servers.  Dubbed "The 300,000 RPM Disk Drive", MFT combines Flash memory based Solid State Drives (SSDs) with a patent pending drive management layer which results in disk performance that is 10 to 30 times faster than 15K RPM disk drives when working with random IO operations.

Flash SSDs only solve the "read half" of the enterprise performance equation.  By delivering 2,000 to 7,000 4K read IOPS (IOs Per  Second), Flash SSDs randomly read 10 to 30 times faster than 15K  SCSI drives. Unfortunately, the random write performance of Flash  SSDs is terrible. With random write rates of only 13 to 50 IOPS,  even applications that do as few as 5% writes will spend 95% of  their time writing.  This renders existing, unmanaged Flash SSDs as  unsuitable for most enterprise applications.  This is what SSD  manufacturers refer to as the random write problem of flash technology.

EasyCo 's Managed Flash Technology solves the Flash SSD random write problem and delivers sustained random write performance that is  more than 100 times faster than the bare solid state flash drive.   As a result, random write speeds increase from the 8 to 50 range to  3,000 to 10,000 IOPS.  Without MFT, Flash SSDs are only marginally  faster than desktop hard disk drives.  With MFT, Flash SSDs are  accelerated into a class by themselves.

EasyCo 's president, Sam Anderson, laughs about the first production data tests. In our first live test, a prospect copied 218,000 of their own records, deliberately sorted out of sequential order, from one database file to another.  Running on a 15K SCSI drive,  the file to file copy took over 45 minutes. In fact, at one point,  the client called to ask if the server had hung (they were testing remotely). The same job on an MFT Flash drive took only 2 minutes and 45 seconds, or 3,963 IOPS.

Chief Technical Officer Doug Dumitru commented:
Thats only half the story.  The MFT technology can also be used in situations with lots of file system RAM cache."  Many users load up a server with enough memory to store the entire active database.  This solves read performance issues, but doesn't help applications that do a lot of writes.  MFT allows you to build a system using RAM to eliminate all disk reads and push real-time writes to an ordinary disk array at >100,000 random writes/sec.  "Its like having a non-volatile ramdisk without any special hardware. Even small servers can benefit from this behavior. Many database import operations end up 100% write-bottlenecked.  A database import job importing 2.2  million voter records for a local political campaign went from 50  minutes with a traditional hard disk to less than 3 minutes with  MFT.  This shows how even small databases can benefit from the fast write performance that MFT delivers.

EasyCo foresees a huge market for its MFT solution.  Over the years, processors and memory have grown exponentially faster while disk drives have remained essentially the same.  The mechanics of  rotating hard disks have only improved about ten-fold in the last three decades in terms of random IO performance, while CPUs are  more than 5000 times as fast.  For many applications this means  that random disk IO is the dominant bottleneck in terms of  application performance.  Even servers running nondisk intensive applications are hitting the limits of disk drives.  Everything from departmental mail servers to web application portals need random disk IO and hard disks just are not keeping up.

The MFT solution addresses this issue on several fronts.  First, it allows servers to scale.  With MFT, you can support as much as 10 to 30 times the number of users or hits with existing CPUs and RAM configurations.  Doing this with traditional hard disks would require arrays consisting of dozens or even hundreds of drives.   While hundred drive arrays do exist, MFT lets you reach the same level of performance with a handful of solid state disks occupying  1/50th the space and consuming 1/500th the power.  Second, MFT can put the snap back into an application.  The ultra low latency of solid state drives directly translates into quicker screen responses and better interactivity, even with busy servers.  The  third front is the performance of single threaded jobs.  These  batch jobs are stuck in a time warp, at the performance levels of a decade ago with nowhere to go.  Adding drives does not help.  With  MFT running, the morning picking ticket job finishes in 10  minutes instead of 2 hours, and a rebuild of your data mining cube  finishes in hours instead of days.  One customer reports that their  end-of-day job went from 10 hours and 57 minutes to just 27 minutes  after migrating to an entry-level MFT server.

EasyCo is now shipping Linux servers pre-configured with raid protected Flash SSD MFT storage subsystems.  Available configurations range from 7 GB to over 600 GB of ultra performance solid state storage.  These configurations deliver from 2,000 RW  IOPS to over 50,000 RW IOPS depending on drive model and quantity.   In comparison, 15K SCSI drives are about 200 IOPS per drive.

Windows solutions and storage appliance solutions should be available by the fourth quarter
07.  EasyCo is also seeking qualified Linux system integrators, as well as server and storage appliance manufacturers who wish to distribute the MFT solution  with their hardware.

More information about MFT is available at http://www.easyco.com .

How many of us would like to have a list of what was entered today, what's due today, or what shipped today? I imagine there are a couple of us anyway. Here are 2 easy ways to get such a report. We'll use Sales Orders entered Today for our examples.

This example may be useful as a wIntegrate Query. The idea here is to use a dict item that will compare today's date with that on a record. I created a dict item, Z_TODAYS_ORDERS , with the following v-code:

Using Info/Access, I can now select and list those Sales Order entered today:

From Kore Technologies Website