Friday, February 26, 2010

Progression Webcast Q&A

Yesterday we did our first of three webcasts on the upcoming release of Advantage version 10. I would like to thank everyone that attended our live webcast. If you missed the webcast yesterday you can see a replay here. You can register for the webcasts using this form.

We had a hand full of questions during the webcast. I have listed these questions and answers below.

  • When will the Version 10 Beta be available?

The Advantage 10 beta is scheduled to be released in late March or early April.

  • When will Version 10 be available?

We normally do a six to eight week beta test cycle. Our current plan is to release Advantage 10 in the second quarter of 2010. We expect it to be available by the end of June.

  • Will Advantage support Hibernate?

We are investigating several ORM solutions for a future version of Advantage. Hibernate is one option we have looked at. If you need this functionality you should vote for Hibernate support on our feedback site 

J.D. Mullin, the Advantage R&D manager, has some additional comments about his blog about ORM.

  • Why does the .dat file need to be stored on the client (as opposed to the server only)?

Both the server and client need to have access to the Unicode functions and collation sequences when manipulating Unicode data. These functions and collations were intentionally left as separate files so they don’t have to be distributed by developers using only ASCII character sets. The Unicode collations are stored in the icudt401.dat file which must be installed on the server and all clients.

  • We still have users with a mix of DOS based programs and Windows based programs sharing a common ADS database. Upgrading users from 8 to 9 caused significant differences. Will there be more with v10. In particular we noted that reindexing ADS files with v9 Windows generates different indexes when called from a DOS program+adsdosip.exe as the transport layer.

We do not expect there to be any significant differences in behavior between Advantage 9 and 10. Your applications should work the same with either version. By participating in the beta program you can identify any issues and provide feedback to the R&D team. This will allow us to provide the best possible migration path when the server is released.

You should always review the "Effects of Upgrading" section of the help file for useful information when changing the version of Advantage that you are using.

  • Will Advantage be using UTF-8 or UTF-16?

Advantage will store Unicode characters in the tables with UTF-16 encoding. However, you can apply any encoding you need once the data has been retrieved from the server.

The next webcast in the series will be on March 25th at 10AM EST and 2PM EST, I hope to see you there.

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