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The first meeting of the newly named Ottawa Sybase User Group was held at the Empire Grill in the "market" area of Ottawa. Many thanks to the local Sybase Ottawa office for their support of the event - in particular Mr. Frank Lawrence. Frank introduced the Sybase team including the new country manager (Bob Elliot) and Quebec salesperson (Ahmadou Monfopa). The meeting started with a continental breakfast at 8:30. Early arrivals were treated with a free Sybase Developer Network T-Shirt!
The first presenter was Mr. Chris Pollach who gave an overview of the Sybase Techwave 2005 conference last August in Las Vegas along with a presentation on the status of various Sybase products and how they were presented at Techwave. Chris showed the 80 people in attendance demonstrations of the following: smlPortal (web portal built in PB - from PowerObjects); Network designer (DW-Extreme); Enable (multi-lingual transformer); new ASA 9.0.2 and ASE 15 graphic query analyzers; a PB 10.2.1 built web site; ASP and ASP.Net web sites built in PB 10.5, SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) client and server components built with PB 10.2.1 and EAServer 5.3 plus Eclipse 3.1 and finally a .Net 2.0 application built live with PB 11! Anthony Antonelli from Sybase thanked Chris for the presentation and congratulated him on winning the Sybase 2005 - "Innovation and Achievement Award". If you would like a copy of Chris' presentation, click here.
The next presenter was Mr. Daren Mallette from Quest software who demonstrated their DBExpert product. Darren used the new ASE 15 database engine and showed how DBExpert can capture the internal SQL activity within ASE and make tuning suggestions for Triggers, Indexes, Stored Procedures, etc. Darren also demonstrated how you can use the product to capture any applications activity live against the DBMS or have it parse, extract and analyze SQL within any application (Delphi, Cobol, "C", VB, PB, etc). He also noted that Chris Pollach has written a PowerBuilder interface to the product and it is available free from Sybase's CodeXchange web site. The last new feature demonstrated was the ability to model SQL activity against a database and then replay this scenario against a new DBMS version or another vendor's DBMS to see what the performance characteristics would be. DBExpert for ASE can be purchased from Sybase whereas, DBExpert for Oracle, MS-SQLServer, etc can be purchased directly fom Quest software (note: they have an Ottawa office).
The last presenter was Mr. Anthony Robinson from Sybase Toronto who demonstrated the new "WorkSpace" product built upon the "Eclipse" Java development platform. Anthony showed how a developer using WS could easily build, deploy, test and debug web services with any J2EE application server. He also gave the audience an overview of the product and it's architecture. It should be noted that the next release of WS will included the DataWindow and DataBase PowerBuilder painters as plug-in's to the Eclipse platform!
During the presentations, more SDN T-Shirts were given out along with NFR copies of WS, PB, PK, and ASE 15! The door prize of an Ipod Nano was won by Mr Gred Winfield - who by the way is on record with Sybase as deploying the first production application for the PocketPC built using Sybase's PocketBuilder product. The first user worldwide of the application (known as AirMan Mobile) was JFK Airport in NY. The product was written by Chris Pollach using the Foundation classes Chris developed and published for free on the ybase CodeXchange web site!
For those who were not in a rush to get back to the office, a finger food lunch was arranged and talk continued over the new Sybase products, services, meeting the Sybase staff, etc. This was certainly an excellent meeting filled with "action packed" demonstrations and live previews of the new PB cutting-edge products.
