TCL – Limiting commands by user

Revelation are gearing up for the release of 9.1.1 shortly and part of this upgrade will be a request made at the recent EMEA RUG meeting in London.

Changes have been made to TCL in the new version. These enhancements will enable developers to limit certain commands so that they can not be run by a particular user. For example, you will be able to expose TCL to your users and at the same time you could restrict access to the CLEARFILE command.

This neat change to TCL will enable users to make better use of TCL, without the application author having to worry about the integrity of the system being compromised in any way.

Revelation User's Conference 2010

Revelation Software is pleased to announce that our keynote speaker for our 2010 Conference is THOMAS J WILSON, president and CEO of Unisphere Media which publishes DATABASE TRENDS AND APPLICATIONS. Tom's keynote presentation is titled "Ten Trends Shaping Information Management in 2010".

Our 2010 Users' Conference will be held at the Rio All-Suite Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada on Tuesday, April 27th - Friday, April 30th, 2010.

Please drop me a line if you would like more details about this main Revelation event.

Hardening OI Directory File permissions

Several of you have recently asked for details about ‘Hardening File permissions on the OpenInsight Directory’. I am pleased to announce the publication of a comprehensive knowledge base article that details this topic.

Locking down file level permissions on the OpenInsight directory is an important step to ensuring the stability of your application. Improper permissions can allow users to change or delete files - accidentally or intentionally. The ‘Hardening File permissions on the OpenInsight Directory’ Knowledge Base article provides guidelines to secure your OpenInsight directory.

Examples of securing the application at the share level and file level are provided within the article. Each example begins with the creation of the destination directory followed by installing OpenInsight into the newly created location. Establishing the destination directory permissions before installation ensures that the administrator installing the application will have rights to modify it later.

RSS feeds on www.revelation.com

The US web site has maintained a number of RSS feeds for sometime, but they have been largely under utilised. This was primarily owing to a login being required to retrieve the feed and, as many RSS readers do not support authentication, this resulted in the feeds being somewhat difficult to access through people’s preferred RSS reader.

Earlier this year, Jared took a look at this issue and he has made changes to the feeds so that they can now be retrieved without the need to login, although a login is still required to view the message content.

At the present time there are feeds for ‘News and Information’, the ‘Online Discussion Forum’ and the ‘OpenInsight WORKS Discussion forum’.

Please also remember to include the RSS feeds for this blog’s posts and comments.

Troubleshooting REAUTH.EXE & NETDRV.EXE

As many people cross-grade existing ARev and OpenInsight systems to version 9.x and deploy new systems on the new version, we have had a few support questions posted with regards to using the REAUTH.EXE file and also NETDRV.EXE.

Both of these files require single user access to key OpenInsight files and, in addition, the renaming or installation of a new OENGINE.DLL file also requires single user access.

Key files can remain locked when a user leaves OpenInsight open on a workstation, and this results in error messages when the above files are utilised. Furthermore, if errors occur but everyone is out of the system, the issue can usually be traced to a hung engine that is still running in memory.

Revelation US have written a very useful article that covers some common steps and includes a utility to resolve the issue of locked files. Please click here to access the article.

From the desk of Bill Caisley

There are a few instances reported that if utilising ARev tables in OI ‘I have to maintain my indexes in ARev, OI does not work!’

If you are using/attaching legacy tables from ARev in OI and there is a Quickdex.mfs on the DICT. you are unable to create a Btree on any of the fields. It will appear to have worked but the index will not exist and it will not work. If you attempt to re-add the index you will receive a message that the ‘index already exists’. What has happened is that the DICT. now has a one (1) in field six which indicates the existence of a Btree on that field.

Revelation are going to produce a meaningful error message in a future release to warn you of this problem.

To successfully maintain indexes from OI you must first remove the Quickdex.mfs from the DICT. by means of a SET_MFS. You should also edit the row in the Dict and remove the one (1) in field 6 if you previously attempted to create an index.

Please also note that Sprezzatura have begun a blog thread regarding ‘Indexing in OpenInsight – Part 1 –What is indexing?’

EMEA RUG update

Last weeks events went very well and whilst the I18N meeting was easy to write about, I’ve only just managed to find a few minutes to get some words down about the RUG. To say that the RUG caused a lot of interest in version 9.1, would be understatement.

The theme of the RUG was primarily OpenInsight version 9.x and, as usual, Mike Ruane took the floor following the usual introductions from around a rather over packed room.

Mike started with an overview of how Revelation has been doing since his last visit, he spoke about some new additions to the team in the USA and how the product has changed over recent releases. Following a short break, he then ran through each of the OpenInsight tools highlighting the key enhancements, many (but not all) are highlighted on my 9.x video. Amongst those enhancements, the edit table enhancements proved to be one of the most popular from the morning session, but many people picked up some very useful tips along the way – such as intercepting drops to the debugger in deployed systems, rather than letting the system appear to hang.

Following lunch, Mike turned to some of the exciting developments that Revelation are working on for 9.2 and later. The SQL-BFS received the most interest and resulted in a number of attendees asking to be included on the forthcoming beta and also wanting to know more about upgrading to 9.1 in readiness for the bond. Following a live demonstration against the Northwind database, people realised just how easy it will be to use the bond (without changing the application) to address the “I need your application to run on a SQL database” question when talking to new prospects looking to buy their OpenInsight systems, currently only running on OpenInsight’s Linear Hash.

As the afternoon drew to a close Mike finished with an overview of O4W, being Revelation’s latest web development tool. The difference with this one is that a fully featured web application can be created online and by largely simply making choices and defining labels. For instance, a form can be created in 9 super simple steps without touching a line of code! Furthermore, menus, pop-ups, online reports, searching, validation and more can all be created in minutes without the need to touch any code. Of course, there is the facility to create and call your own programs if necessary, but the vast majority of the work is done for you if you need a quick, easy to maintain web based application.

With the SQL-BFS and O4W alone, the forthcoming 9.x and version 10.x releases are looking like providing even more tools to make developers lives easier and the inclusion of more interface enhancements will make the end-user experience far better.

Before anyone asks, timescales for 9.2 are early to mid 2010, probably around conference time, but Mike could not promise anything. However, I’m hoping to have a very early ‘pre-beta release’ of the SQL-BFS and O4W around Christmas time, so make a note to contact me in early January if you would like to see more of these two exciting OpenInsight developments.

I then closed the meeting with the usual thank you and touched very briefly on my use of social networking and my changed views on the topic. This month alone we have welcomed ten new OpenInsight WORKS subscribers into the community, two of which came to us through online social networking. I’ll be blogging on this subject over the coming weeks as I refine my use and find more time saving methods of using the key resources, but please drop me an email if you would like to learn more and find out how you can begin to gain greater exposure and credibility in your market.

Sprezzatura's Blogging Basic+ 1.7.0 update

Sprezzatura have released an upgrade to their free Basic+ Source Code Publisher that I featured in my 30th March blog posting. If you are publishing Basic+ source code to the Revelation forum or your own blog, then I’d strongly recommend Carl’s utility – click here for further details.

I18N Round Table

Today saw the long awaited I18N (Internationalisation) meeting in Ealing. Revelation UK staff and Mike Ruane, over from the US, were joined by a handful of key developers from Europe involved and interested in better support for I18N within OpenInsight.

Following the usual introductions during which attendees highlighted their needs for I18N within OpenInsight, Mike touched on the position of OpenInsight when he took over the product and then the main I18N enhancements that Revelation have built into the product since version 4.1.3, through the 7.x series and into the recent enhancements in 9.x.

The day then followed a round table discussion format during which various topics were openly discussed. The idea was for Mike and Carl, to fully understand what our International clients need for enhanced I18N support in OpenInsight version 9.2, 10.0 and later.

Some of the topics discussed included; better support for UTF8 and possible future support for UTF16, collation sequences, LH4 to handle full UTF8 data, caching and performance implications following the necessary changes.

Collation sequences became a major topic of discussion and Mike showed how version 9.x can use Windows Collation. Attendees were invited to submit examples of their collation sequences to Mike.

Following a lengthy discussion, most of which was beyond my comprehension, the general consensus was that Revelation are almost there already, but that the proposed changes will address most of the things that our International clients need and that the enhancements should open up more doors and opportunities for us all.

I’ll not go as far as indicating what Revelation’s plans are following the meeting as it is too early and Mike has much to think about. However, the meeting generated five key areas to consider for 9.2 and certainly leaves the development team with a more clearly defined idea of what is needed for far better support for I18N in OpenInsight 9.2 and later.

Personally, I would like to thank Kerry Walter, Alexander Holliday, Stefano Cavaglieri, Neville Jones and Gary St Denis for taking time to meet with us and to contribute to this large and complex topic.

RevSoftUK and Twitter

Well it is now official, I am a ‘Twit’terer!

I’ve had a Twitter account for a while, but never really got into the whole idea of using it in a business context – personally, I can think of nothing worse than spending a hour a day finding out what your contacts had for breakfast this morning, plan to do in their private time this evening or any of the other 'twatter' the service appears to generate.

In addition, finding time to maintain the blog, a couple of networking sites and Twitter was resulting in late evenings and an unwanted distraction.

However, I’ve had a slight change of thought recently and I’ve now begun adding Twitter’s ‘Tweet’ button to my blog postings and I have also begun to use Twitter for short information blasts with a Revelation topic. If you have a Twitter account, you can easily use the Tweet button to tweet the posting onwards to your followers. In addition, you can follow me (log into Twitter and search for mdp_revsoft) and receive small bite sized timely twitter postings about Revelation related topics – I won’t over burden you and I’ll be keeping my tweets on topic. In addition, my tweets will NOT be linked to or appearing on the blog, keeping the blog clean.

I’ll still be maintaining the blog as the main vehicle for technical information, news and other information coming from my desk. So please be sure to follow and/or subscribe to the blog.