Eloquence fast indexes on display Thursday
May 16, 2012
The Eloquence database and language gets a curtain call tomorrow (May 17) at 11AM PDT (2PM EDT) in a Webinar devoted to the speedy enhancements for the 8.20 version of this drop-in replacement for TurboIMAGE. Creator Michael Marxmeier led a Webinar late in April in conjunction with Birket Foster of MB Foster. That program was so popular it was fully subscribed before it began -- a rare thing in the online training world.
The fast indexing features included in the newest release "is like Google-class searches, but on text databases," said Foster. "If you use COBOL, Fortran, or Powerhouse with it, for example, it allows you to do very graphic text indexing. It allows flexible ways of dealing with data. If you have a description of a part, every word in that description becomes a pointer back to that record."
The work from Marxmeier's team is now in beta status until July's full rollout. This latest Eloquence brings the performance of an IMAGE indexer such as Omnidex to this replacement for IMAGE, a tool for any migrator who needs a database that requires no changes to a 3000 app's database calls. These are changes that carry no extra charge for current customers of the database. Eloquence was at the heart of the Summit Technology Spectrum/3000 credit union customer migration. Its new indexing is power a developer can understand and love easier than any C-level executive -- who will be glad to learn it's very fast.
Registration for the free Webinar of 45 minutes with Marxmeier and Foster is at the MB Foster website. Audio is being offered both as Internet VOIP worldwide, and also as a toll-free call in North America. Attendance at the last webinar included Eloquence users who have never had a 3000 relationship, Foster said. The customers already deploying Eloquence are excited about these changes, too. "You can create new queries that are kind of Google-like," Foster said.
"You can find entries in your database in new ways," Foster says. "For example you can find all customers who had a transaction > $10,000 in a date range (May 1, 2012 - May 15, 2012) without doing a table scan. You can also index each word in a text field or description -- it could be looking for all customers with city = 'Dallas' or with the word 'shipping' in the transaction description."
To get this kind of retrieval very little change needs to be made, and a program or even QUERY/3000 can use this capability. "Little work, new flexibility in retrieval, means lots of new possibilities for our customers," Foster said. DBFINDs, DBGETs, and DBINFOs have extra commands and new modes.
The UDA Central extract, transform and load (ETL) tools at MB Foster are being prepared to employ the new indexing, he added. On July 25-27 a three day, $950 workshop is scheduled for full training on Eloquence, hosted at the MB Foster HQ in Southern Ontario outside of Ottawa. It's designed to help developers do the database architecture based on the kinds of retrievals they'd like to do. Details on registering for that training -- which culminates with Foster's annual BBQ on July 28 -- are available from Foster at 800-ANSWERS.