Friday, August 28, 2009

Advantage Technical Summit Day 3

Although our technical summits normally last two days we provided some additional content for this event. We started the morning with a presentation from Tenderfoot Software. They use Advantage Replication to track sales from stores around the country. It was a great demonstration of replication at work to provide a consolidated look at data from several remote sites in real-time.

After the demonstration we broke out into two groups to discuss web development with Advantage. We did a session on using ASP.NET and PHP with Advantage. I presented a class on database design principals which attempts to demonstrate practical uses of various database objects (i.e. stored procedures, triggers, replication etc…)

I want to thank everyone who took the time out of their busy schedules to spend a few days with us in Washington D.C. As always we got some great feedback from everyone. If you missed this technical summit we would love to have you at our next summit in Boise. Our next technical summit will be in the Spring of 2010, I hope to see you there.

Thursday, August 27, 2009

Advantage Technical Summit Day 2

Day two of the Advantage Technical Summit included in-depth training on SQL, Data Dictionaries, Stored Procedures, Replication, Triggers, File Formats, Delphi, Visual Studio and Visual FoxPro. Our SQL training is broken up into four sessions which go from the basics through SQL scripting and information on SQL optimization.

It is a very full day of training and we received a lot of great feedback from the attendees. This group has been very interactive with lots of questions and input during the training. We had two tracks running providing a total of twelve classes during our second day.

The final session of the day was presented by Anders Olsen from Embarcadero Technologies. Anders spent about 90 minutes discussing the latest version of Delphi which is included in RAD Studio 2010. We will be supporting Delphi 2010 with the next service release of Advantage.

UPDATE: You can get some additional information from JD's blog.

After the training we hosted the Potomac Area FoxPro User Group meeting. There was a great turnout and like all the other FoxPro groups we have visited this year they were a great group of developers. We discussed Advantage and our unique offering for the Visual FoxPro community. Many thanks to all the members that showed up for the meeting.

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Advantage Technical Summit Day 1

The first day of the Advantage Technical Summit began with the Techwave keynote presentation. After lunch the Advantage track began with an introduction from Mike Hagman the Advantage Product Manager. From there the training went much like it does when we hold it in Boise.

I did an overview of the server with about half the attendees. You can view a quick overview of Advantage here. JD Mullin conducted a round table with the rest of the attendees. The roundtable is an excellent opportunity to interact directly with the Advantage R&D team and provide feedback on how Advantage is performing with your application. You also get a peek at some of the upcoming features.

After the first two sessions the next presentation was on the Advantage Full Text Search engine. An online seminar discussing Full Text Search can be download here.

The last session of the day was our product direction session. For this session J.D. Mullin discusses the plans for the next version of Advantage. You have to attend this session to get this information. However, you can see a list of the upcoming features on the DevZone. You can also see which features have been completed by going to the Advantage UserVoice page.

You can follow all the happenings at the conference on Twitter.

Monday, August 24, 2009

Advantage Technical Summit

SummitLogoWebMed The next Advantage Technical Summit begins on Wednesday in Washington DC. The summit will be in conjunction with the Sybase TechWave Symposium. I am really looking forward to seeing all of the Advantage Partners that have signed up for the event.

Although I have been a bit lax on updating this blog over the past few weeks, I will be adding several posts during the Technical summit. Also look for the rest of the tips from last month to be up soon. I'll be back to my regular schedule in September.

Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Tips Round Three Complete

The third round of tips is now complete. All of the tips ( 41 – 60 ) are listed below. The first round of tips were posted in November 2008 and the second round were posted in February 2009. All of the tips are tagged with Tips making them easy to find.

  1. Creating Tables with SQL
  2. Adding Tables to a Dictionary
  3. Removing Tables from a Dictionary
  4. Altering Table Structure
  5. Modifying Table Properties
  6. Getting Server Information from AdsConnection Object
  7. Getting a List of Tables on a Connection
  8. Get Database Info from AdsConnection Object
  9. Retrieving Database Objects
  10. Working with Connection Events
  11. Using the Advantage Crystal Reports Driver
  12. Opening a Crystal Report with Visual Studio
  13. Dynamically Assigning a DataSet to a Report
  14. Design a Table within the Delphi IDE
  15. Pausing Replication
  16. Using Advantage Online Backup
  17. Creating a Differential Backup
  18. Restoring Data
  19. Backup and Restore Options
  20. AdsBackup Utility Options

My plan is to get another round of tips published before the end of the year. Hopefully you found something useful in this round of tips. If you have any suggestions or ideas for future tips feel free to add your comments and suggestions.

Monday, August 3, 2009

FAQs – July 2009

Which Advantage Clients are Available in 64-bit

With version 9 of Advantage a 64-bit version of the Server was released. The 64-bit server can be accessed by any of the current Advantage clients. You do not need to make any changes to your client application, although using the same client and server version is recommended, to connect to the 64-bit server.

If you want to create a 64-bit client application you will need to recompile your client application. We currently have 64-bit versions of the ACE API and .NET DataProvider. We have plans to release 64-bit versions of our OLEDB provider, ODBC driver and PHP driver.

Using the Advantage .NET Data Provider on Vista 64-bit

64-bit operating systems support both 32-bit and 64-bit applications. In many cases the operating system will run either of these application types seamlessly. However, when developing on a 64-bit system you need to make sure that you are loading the appropriate DLLs and components for your application.

When developing a .NET application the key is setting the proper target platform. For a 32-bit application your target should be x86 and use the x64 target for 64 bit applications. The Advantage 64-bit .NET data provider will be installed on a 64-bit system by default.

One additional pitfall is in redistribution of the DLLs. You must distribute the proper version of the .NET data provider and Advantage DLLs with your application. Make sure you include the 64-bit versions of Advantage.Data.Provider.dll, Ace32.dll and axcws32.dll. You can verify the version (32-bit vs 64-bit) of the DLLs by ----.

Scott Hanselman has a great overview of 32-bit vs 64-bit with .NET on his blog.

9107 Errors

When the Advantage server is unable to close a specific handle a 9107 error is generated. This can occur when the server tries to close a static cursor or temporary table. Both static cursors and temp tables can be stored in temporary files (*.tmp) which will show up in the data directory or in the temp path as defined in the data dictionary. When the static cursor or temp table is closed the temporary file should be deleted.

If the temporary file cannot be deleted the server will get an error and a 9107 will be logged. This can occur if the file has been locked by another process such as a virus scanner. We recommend excluding the data directory from virus scanning since a virus scanner may scan a file on open and close. This should eliminate any 9107 errors and potentially improve performance since the files are no longer being scanned.

Using Mapped Drives

One way of ensuring that all clients have access to the same data is to map the same drive letter to a data share on all of the client machines. This can be easily done with a batch file that is run at startup. However, if you are using a server-side alias you cannot map a drive since there is no network share to map to. In this case you can create a virtual mapped drive using the ADS.INI file.

Adding a drive letter and a path to the [DRIVES] section of the ads.ini file allows any Advantage client the ability to use that mapped drive. This entry can point to an actual network share or a server-side alias. Make sure that you designate a letter that has not already been assigned to a local device or other mapping. If there is a conflict with a particular drive letter a 7078 error will occur.