Caché 4.2

Features

Overview

Caché 4.2 is aimed at application developers, with new XML capabilities, a new Studio with built-in debugging, new SOAP support for building Web Services, new Enterprise Java capabilities, and other features. It also has important deployment-oriented features, including new distributed database technology and our first UNIX shared-disk cluster implementation.

Features

Basic – According to IDC, half of the world’s professional developers know Visual Basic. To make it easy for those developers to be immediately productive with Caché, we are adding Basic as a new scripting language. Basic can be used to implement methods in Caché classes, can directly access globals and objects, and can interoperate with Caché ObjectScript. With this version, Basic will be ready for use by programmers but still subject to refinements based on feedback from users.

System OREF Support – Enables Caché to manage the in-memory life cycle of objects and automatically close objects that are no longer reachable. By eliminating the need for developers to manually perform these "housekeeping" chores, this feature simplifies application development and increases application reliability.

Bit Map Indices – This new type of index will deliver tremendous performance gains for certain types of queries, particularly where there are complex logical criteria for selecting data. Bit map indices are used by both SQL and object access.

Tru64 Cluster Support – Extension of Caché shared-disk clustering capabilities to Compaq’s TruCluster environment on Tru64 UNIX systems.

New Distributed Database – A successor to DCP that is optimized for our new database engine and the enormous scale of systems now being deployed by our customers. It will support both 8KB and 2KB block formats and be able to work side-by-side with earlier networking technologies.

New Studio – To provide a much richer, easier-to-use development environment, the new Studio combines the functions of the old Studio and Architect plus new GUI debugging.

XML – This release provides an efficient bi-directional connection between Caché objects and XML documents. Using a built-in XML parser, an XML document can be transformed into one or more Caché objects. In the other direction, Caché objects can be transformed in an XML document.

SOAP – This release enables Caché to act as a SOAP server, making Caché a rapid development and high performance platform for Web Services applications.

Enterprise Java Support – We have seen a marked increase in real application development with Java and Caché and we are enhancing our Java capabilities with a JDBC 2.0 compliant JDBC driver, a next generation Caché Java binding, and support for Enterprise Java Beans.

CSP Enhancements – The evolution of CSP continues with a number of enhancements, including: cookie-less session management; Java-less server-side method invocation; and support for INCLUDing within a CSP page.

COM Gateway – This technology enables a Caché application to make direct use of Windows COM (aka ActiveX) objects. The description of a COM class (e.g. a type library) is imported into Caché, enabling "foreign" COM objects of that class to be used within Caché as if they were native Caché objects. [Windows only]

Class Compiler Improvements – A new class/table compiler will make the compilation process much faster and reduce the disk space needed to store class/table definitions.

Very large memory model support – For OpenVMS, HP, and AIX.

IBM MQSeries Interface – Provides a simple interface that enables Caché applications to operate as a client to IBM’s messaging software. This will provide a new level of interoperability with other applications and systems, including IBM mainframes.

Procedure Block Methods – Enables methods to be coded as procedure blocks with variable encapsulation.

SQL Improvements – Faster aggregates, SHOW PLAN

Improved Call Out – Enhanced capability to call out to shared libraries, including the ability to use multiple shared libraries simultaneously.

Licensing Improvements – Support for 2001 price list, including new product and license types. To accomplish this, version 4.2 will include a new key format and customers migrating from earlier versions will require new keys.

Dynamic Process Table – The internal table of Caché process information now grows dynamically, eliminating the need to specify a size in the configuration.

Cluster Journaling Improvements – The systems management interface for journal restore in a cluster environment has been overhauled.

Cluster Shadowing – A Caché cluster system (including its cluster-mounted databases) can now be shadowed.

BMC Patrol Interface – Enables the availability and performance of Caché systems to be monitored via the Patrol monitoring product from BMC Software.

LOCK Optimizations – Some additional performance optimizations for the LOCK command

ODBC Version 3.5 Support -- The Cache ODBC driver will be updated to the v3.5 API, enabling some ODBC calls to be handled more efficiently. Notably, it means that, if a client application asks for UNICODE (wide character data) AND Cache has served this data up as UNICODE, we can skip an additional data conversion within the ODBC client. We can also eliminate certain problems where the client character code page does not match the server by using UNICODE along the entire data path.

C++ Support – A new native C++ binding for all Caché platforms.

Limitations

In-memory connections for ODBC are no longer supported.