Sybase Users' Group of Texas
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Events » Past Meetings

Below is the list of past meeting with links to the meeting newsletters.

DateDescription
Tuesday,
June 24, 2008		 "PowerBuilder in a .NET World" Part 2
The Sybase Users' Group of Texas held their meeting on Tuesday, June 24, 2008. For the first time, a virtual meeting was held along with the regular meeting to allow users from other areas of Texas to join the meeting. Virtual attendees included users from Dallas and College Station. Don Clayton, SUG-TX president, welcomed everyone to the meeting. SUG-TX secretary Cindy Bean gave a brief overview of the changes to the SUG-TX membership as it continues to be a local user group under the ISUG umbrella.

Don Clayton, SUG-TX president and president of Intertech Consulting, presented part II of PowerBuilder in a .NET World, continuing from a presentation at the SUG-TX meeting in April. Don presented how PowerBuilder 11 makes it possible to produce and consume .NET classes and provides a variety of deployment options, including DataWindow .NET 2.5 and Appeon .NET Version 6.0. The presentation included a selection of best practices on producing and consuming .NET classes in PowerBuilder and reviewed a number of topics related to PowerBuilder and .NET, including an overview of .NET, PB .NET, using .NET features in PowerBuilder, translating C# code snippet to PowerScript, consuming Web Services using .NET interop, and using the .NET DataWindow with other .NET languages.
Tuesday,
April 26, 2008		 "PowerBuilder 11.2 and .Net"
Hosted by Don Clayton, Intertech Consulting, Inc.

PowerBuilder 11
PowerBuilder 11 creates applications that run in the .NET Common Language Runtime (CLR), and once a PowerBuilder application is running in .NET there is a new universe of capability and functionality that comes with .NET, including .ASPX deployment, .NET interoperability, cross language component invocation, and other important architectural considerations.
PowerBuilder 11 makes it possible to consume .NET classes. This in turn makes the vast number of .NET classes written in all .NET languages available to PowerBuilder developers. This presentation shows a selection of best practices on how to produce and consume the .NET classes in PowerBuilder.
Don Clayton with Intertech Consulting, Inc. reviewed a number of topics related to PowerBuilder and .NET, including:

  • Overview of .NET
  • Overview of PB .NET
  • Using .NET features in PowerBuilder
  • Translating C# code snippet to PowerScript
  • Consuming Web Services using .NET interop
Tuesday,
March 25, 2008		 The Sybase Users' Group of Texas held their March meeting on Tuesday, March 25, 2008. SUG-TX President, Don Clayton, welcomed everyone to the meeting. Don introduced Mark Mumy from Sybase, who presented "How to Deal with Volumes of Data with Sybase IQ." Mark showed how Sybase IQ can help companies deal with growing volumes of data. As their data explodes, so does the cost of managing and storing the data, and it becomes challenging to give users the access they need to analyze and extract value from it. Sybase IQ helps them deal with those challenges.

The second topic was a presentation on "Monitoring IQ with Surveillance" by Ed Stangler of Bradmark Technologies, Inc. Ed showed how Surveillance can monitor how Sybase IQ is performing and allow you to see the details. Surveillance also monitors ASE and Replication Server.
Tuesday,
January 22, 2008		 "Sybase Roundtable Discussion"

The Sybase Users' Group of Texas held a meeting on Tuesday, January 22, 2008. The meeting was to plan for the presentations for 2008. The planned topics are
* March 25:Sybase IQ
* April 26:PowerBuilder 11.2 and .Net
* June 23:Sybase Application Development Tools
* July 22:Adaptive Server Enterprise 15
* August 26:TechWave Recap
* September 23:Sybase Application Development Tools
* October 28:Sybase Modeling & Metadata Tools
Tuesday,
December 11, 2007		 Instead of our monthly, we held our annual Holiday Party at the Stag's Head Pub at 2128 Portsmouth, in Shepherd Square (near Richmond and Greenbriar). We had a hopping good time exchanging stories, swapping tales and making contacts.  Next year, you should make a point to join us... you won't be disappointed!

Merry Christmas to all and have a safe new year!
Tuesday,
November 27, 2007		 "Sybase Roundtable Discussion"
The Sybase Users' Group of Texas met on Tuesday, November 27, 2007 at the HAL-PC offices. The meeting was a follow up to the August meeting Appeon vs PowerBuilder Bake-off. At that time we reviewed the steps to take a PowerBuilder application to the web using PowerBuilder 11's new features, versus using the Appeon 5.0 .NET Edition. This follow up presentation was a "Deep Dive" into the Appeon 5.0 for PowerBuilder .NET Edition.

In the follow up presentation, the underlying mechanics of the Appeon 5.0 .NET Edition product were presented. N-tier Web applications can be generated from existing PowerBuilder application code using only standard PowerBuilder client/server programming. End-users are presented with the familiar rich user interface that keeps them highly productive.

Appeon for PowerBuilder .NET Edition automatically replicates the client/server user interface with HTML running in standard Microsoft Web browsers. The application business logic including DataWindows and Embedded SQL is deployed to a .NET-based back-end. The back-end can be readily integrated with other .NET or Web Services-based Web applications. The standard n-tier Web architecture of Appeon for PowerBuilder offers a high degree of scalability, availability, reliability, flexibility and security.
Tuesday,
October 23, 2007		 "Sybase Roundtable Discussion"

The Sybase Users' Group of Texas met on October 23rd at the HAL-PC offices. Following the group's introductions, a spirited roundtable discussion regarding Sybase PowerBuilder, PowerDesigner, and database solutions ensued, including the recent revelation that the Sybase stock price has skyrocketed from a 52 week low to a 52 week high over three months.

The surge in stock price occurred on news that Investment firm Sandell Asset Management Corp. has urged the company to improve the value of its shares through a buyback or possible sale of its units. The firm, which owns 6% of Sybase, told Chief Executive John Chen in a letter that the company should conduct an immediate $500 million buyback of shares at a premium price, spin off its mobility segment, or sell the company in whole or in part. In other financial news the trading volume of Sybase has increased dramatically over the same period.
Tuesday,
August 28, 2007		 "PowerBuilder 11 Road Show" by SUG-TX Secretary, Cindy Bean and SUG-TX President, Don Clayton.

The Sybase Users' Group of Texas held their August meeting on Tuesday, August 28, 2007. The first topic was a wrap up of the TechWave 2007 conference, held August 6th through 10th in Las Vegas. SUG-TX secretary Cindy Bean reviewed the DBA topics of interest then SUG-TX president Don Clayton reviewed the developer topics.

The second half of the meeting was an Appeon vs PowerBuilder Bake-off by SUG-TX president Don Clayton. Don reviewed the steps to take a PowerBuilder application to the web with Appeon using the SUG-TX member portal. He showed the same steps with PowerBuilder 10.5 and discussed some new benefits with PowerBuilder 11. Both products have their advantages and limitations depending on which PowerBuilder functions are used in the application.
Tuesday,
June 26, 2007		 "What's New with PowerDesigner 12.1" by SUG-TX President, Don Clayton.

PowerDesigner 12.1 has arrived and brings many new and improved features. PowerDesigner supports over fifty-six distinct database versions, six object-oriented programming languages; web services design using XML and SOAP, four business process orchestration languages, and a host of other nifty functions. PowerDesigner 12.1 now functions as a plug-in for Visual Studio 2005, Eclipse, and PowerBuilder. For object-oriented modeling, all UML 2.0 diagrams are now supported. Version 12.1 also offers unequalled support for the new features of SQL Server 2005 and Oracle 10g. Don presented and demonstrated the new features at the meeting.
Tuesday,
March 27, 2007		 The presentation was on the Sybase Data Integration Suite, a techcast presented by ISUG.

The Sybase Data Integration Suite offers a smarter, more streamlined approach to delivering diverse data throughout the enterprise with comprehensive data integration capabilities including data federation, replication, and ETL capabilities along with integrated modeling and development tools. Bill Jacobs and Bill Zhang, Sybase Data Integration Suite experts, discussed ways you can efficiently integrate data to simplify reporting, warehouse augmentation and application development projects while enhancing the value of your existing data assets.
December 21, 2006 Instead of our monthly, we held our annual Holiday Party at the Fox Sports Grill at the Galleria III starting at 4:30pm. We had a hopping good time exchanging stories, swapping tales and making contacts.  Next year, you should make a point to join us... you won't be disappointed!

Merry Christmas to all and have a safe new year!
Tuesday,
November 28, 2006
 The Sybase Users' Group of Texas (SUG-TX) held their the November meeting with the Dave Fish techcast of a preview of PowerBuilder 11.
Tuesday,
October 24, 2006
 The Sybase Users' Group of Texas (SUG-TX) did not hold a meeting on Tuesday, October 24th due to scheduling conflicts. We look forward to seeing everyone at the next meeting on November 28th. Also, stay tuned for details on our holiday party in December.

Sincerely,

Donald D. Clayton
President
Sybase User's Group of Texas, Inc.
Tuesday,
October 24, 2006
 The Sybase Users' Group of Texas (SUG-TX) dit not hold a meeting on Tuesday, October 24th due to scheduling conflicts. We look forward to seeing everyone at the next meeting on November 28th. Also, stay tuned for details on our holiday party in December.

Sincerely,

Donald D. Clayton
President
Sybase User's Group of Texas, Inc.
Tuesday,
September 26, 2006
 The Sybase Users' Group of Texas held their September meeting on Tuesday, September 26th with a presentation on "Managing PowerBuilder and Transact-SQL applications with Visual Expert 5.7" and "Create and manage user profiles and permissions for PowerBuilder applications with Visual Guard 10.0" by Christophe Dufourmantelle of Novalys. Christophe explained how the products worked and provided an excellent demonstration.

For those of you who couldn't make it, Novalys has a special offer for SUG-TX members! Read more about Visual Expert at: www.visual-expert.com (cross references, source code documentation, code exploration...). Just send an email to anne.bataille@novalys.net.
Tuesday,
August 22, 2006
 The Sybase Users' Group of Texas held their August meeting on Tuesday, August 22nd with a wrap-up of the recent TechWave 2006 conference held in August 6th – 10th in Las Vegas, NV. President, Don Clayton, welcomed everyone to the meeting. The group discussed initial comments about TechWave then started the review. SUG-TX secretary, Cindy Bean, started the review with the activities around the database products. Cindy showed highlights of the Tuesday morning keynote, "Making Data Come Alive and Work for Organizations" presented by Dr. Raj Nathan, senior vice president, Sybase Information Technology Solutions Group. The keynote included a demonstration of ASE shared disk clusters by Irfan Khan and Rob Verschoor, both of Sybase, Inc. The keynote recording can be viewed at:

http://main01.hostcast.com/custom/sybase/archives/keynote3.html

Next, Don Clayton shared the highlights of the activities around the development products. Don discussed some of the interesting announcements on PowerBuilder, PowerDesigner, and WorkSpace. Don also showed portions of the second keynote on Tuesday morning, "Today's Development Trends are Driving Tomorrow's Technologies," also hosted by Dr. Raj Nathan. This keynote recording can be viewed at:

http://main01.hostcast.com/custom/sybase/archives/keynote4.html

TechWave 2006 was filled with excellent presentations from Sybase users and employees. Most of the conference content can be downloaded at:

https://1bosweb3.conferon.com/Events/Sybase/Techwave2006/Agenda/agenda_search_category.html?type=

Be sure to stay tuned for details on TechWave 2007, location and dates to be announced.
Tuesday,
June 27, 2006		 SUG-TX had the pleasure of welcoming Dave Fish, Sybase Senior Technical Evangelist, to our meeting to present PowerBuilder 10.5 and PowerBuilder 11, which will be the first version of PowerBuilder to compile to Microsoft .NET. Dave explained and demonstrated the new features of PowerBuilder 10.5 including enhanced menus and toolbars, new RTE control, TreeView DataWindow, AutoSize Height for All DataWindow Bands, new Group Header control features, DropDownCalendar/DatePicker Control, Web Services Enhancements, print preview enhancements, and database tracing enhancements.

Dave also presented an exciting roadmap to .NET. All PowerBuilder system classes have been remapped from the Windows API to their .NET equivalents. Thus all classes will inherit either from the .NET system namespace or from a Sybase .NET namespace. PowerBuilder 11 will compile to MSIL, and be deployable as a .NET assembly into the .NET runtime cache. This promises to be an exciting year for PowerBuilder and we appreciate Dave's insight into PowerBuilder's .NET future.

Meeting Resources:
Tuesday,
April 25, 2006		 The Sybase Users' Group of Texas held their meeting on Tuesday, April 25, 2006. The topic was "Achieving Higher Throughput with Your SQL Anywhere Database" an iAnywhere "for developers, by developers" webcast led by Todd Loomis, Chief Systems Architect at CodeWorks Software Systems. The session discussed the lessons learned from implementing high throughput systems and offered advice based on Todd's experience running SQL Anywhere databases storing hundreds of gigabytes of data. The presentation was followed by a round table discussion.
Tuesday,
February 28, 2006		 Don Clayton, SUG-TX President, has been traveling all over the country helping enterprises adopt either PowerDesigner or QDesigner, Quest Software's version of PowerDesigner. PowerDesigner/QDesigner is the current leader of the Gartner Group's "Magic Quadrant" for enterprise design tools. The Gartner Group Magic Quadrant measures a product's thought leadership and the owner's ability to execute their vision. PowerDesigner is also the current market leader in enterprise-class data and object design tools. The organizations Don has visited have been adopting PowerDesigner at the enterprise level to replace a wide variety of different design products or to reduce the number of products in use.

How PowerDesigner is used by an organization depends on a number of factors. Don reviewed Model-Driven Architecture and facilitated a discussion of how various different technical architectures leverage the features of PowerDesigner. He then demonstrated some of the newest features of PowerDesigner, and discussed the common drivers behind the current wave of adoption, including the PowerDesigner enterprise repository, MetaWorks. He will closed with a series of case studies culled from the large number of PowerDesigner customers he has seen in the last year.
January 24, 2005 Jeff Wayt of IOBar, Inc., presented on two topics: Date Intervals- Strategies for Recurring Events implemented in PowerBuilder, and Email Empowering Your PowerBuilder Application. Jeff has created a set of PowerBuilder PFC extensions that provide Outlook-like recurring date interval functionality. He handed out some diskettes with the PB source for those in attendance. Jeff also discussed the various approaches to mail-enabling PowerBuilder applications, including SMTP agents, Mail client remote invocation, and a variety of other approaches. Jeff's presentations were well received.
December 15, 2005 Instead of our monthly, we held our annual Holiday Party at the Fox Sports Grill at the Galleria III starting at 4:30pm. We had a hopping good time exchanging stories, swapping tales and making contacts.  Next year, you should make a point to join us... you won't be disappointed!

Merry Christmas to all and have a safe new year!
November 22, 2005 Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
ASE 15 Launch
November 08, 2005		 SUG-TX Launches ASE 15

SUG-TX invited Jeff Tallman, Sybase Evangelist, to Houston to help SUG-TX launch ASE 15. The group met at Jillian's on Tuesday, Nov 8th to learn about some of ASE 15's innovative features including:

  • On-Disk Encryption – Encrypt data on disk (and into backups) without any application modifications.
  • Smart Partitions – Break down very large tables into several smaller tables, either by key, hash-code, range of values or round-robin.
  • New Query Processing Engine – Greatly enhance the performance of complex queries. When coupled with two other new features, Computed Columns and Function Indexes, some customers have seen reductions of up to 80% of reporting time on mission critical reports.

ASE 15 includes more features than Jeff had time to cover. Check out more on ASE on http://www.sybase.com/ase.
October 25, 2005 The October SUG-TX meeting was a wrap up of the TechWave 2005 Conference. SUG-TX board members Don Clayton, Kathy Ridley, Cindy Bean, and Cynthia Gill attended TechWave and reviewed the information presented in glorious Las Vegas, including ISUG's new My.ISUG.com members web site, products futures and directions.
September 27, 2005 The SUG-TX meeting scheduled for Tuesday, September 27th, 2005 was cancelled. Hurricane Rita caused the HAL-PC offices to have limited use and they cancelled SIG meetings on that Tuesday. SUGTX postponed the presentation until October.

We apologize for this inconvenience.

Sincerely,

Donald D. Clayton
President
Sybase User's Group of Texas, Inc.
August 23, 2005 Due to the Sybase Tech Wave in glorious Las Vegas, Nevada, the Sybase Users' Group of Texas did not hold a meeting in August.
July 26, 2005 Due to scheduling issues, the Sybase Users' Group of Texas did not hold a meeting in May.
June 28, 2005 The presentation topic was "Easy XML Documents with PowerBuilder Document Object Model." The presentation was first presented as part of the monthly ISUG Techcast series. Peer-level discussions on how to apply this and other PB techniques as well will was held after the presentation.
May 26, 2005 Due to scheduling issues, the Sybase Users' Group of Texas did not hold a meeting in May.
April 26, 2005 Due to scheduling issues, the Sybase Users' Group of Texas did not hold a meeting in April.
March 22, 2005 Dave Fink and Bryan Roberts, both of Intertech Consulting, reviewed and demonstrated the beta release of the DataWindow .Net v1.5 product from Sybase. With the release of 1.5, Sybase will expand the DataWindow .Net feature set to provide developers with DataWindows & DataStores to use with .NET Web Forms, in addition to Windows Forms.

Meeting Resources:
February 22, 2005 Due to scheduling issues, the Sybase Users' Group of Texas did not hold a meeting in February.
January 25, 2005 The Sybase Users' Group of Texas held their first meeting of 2005 on Tuesday, January 25th. The first meeting of the year involves planning for the year ahead and electing officers. The officers elected for 2005 are:

PresidentDonald Clayton, Intertech Consulting
Vice PresidentBernie Dy, MI Drilling
TreasurerKathy Ridley, Adea Solutions
SecretaryCindy Bean, BMC Software

Don reviewed the topics and meetings held in 2004 and asked for suggestions for topics for 2005. Many good ideas were mentioned and there will be some great topics this year. Don's presentation is available at: http://www.sugtx.org/MeetingResources/20050125/SugTXJanuary2005Meeting.pps.

The major topic suggestions for 2005 are as follows:
PowerBuilder .Net DataWindow Unleashed
Sybase's Mobile and Wireless Solutions
Using EAServer 5.2 with Java and J2EE
PowerBuilder 11 - The latest .Net Language
Sybase Enterprise Portal
Moving from ERWin or Rational Rose to PowerDesigner 11
Advanced Features of Sybase ASE 15
The New Java DataWindow
Sybase on Linux Strategies

The officers for 2005 will endeavor to put on the highest quality presentations available this year, with more of a solutions-based focus and hands on examples. This will be an exciting year for Sybase, especially for the release of ASE 15.0 this year. In the tools area, PowerBuilder becomes a full .Net language this year with support for the .Net System namespace, DataWindows in web forms, ASPX support for PowerBuilder applications, including the ability to inherit from C# and VB.Net objects and vice versa. If you have any other suggestions for topics for 2005, the agenda is still being finalized and it is not too late to make some suggestions.
December 15, 2004 Annual Holiday Party Highlights...
The Sybase Users' Group of Texas held their annual holiday party at the Fox Sports Grill at the Galleria III on Wednesday, December 15th. SUG-TX officers Don Clayton, Kathy Ridley, Cynthia Gill, and Cindy Bean were joined by Bill Wing, our local Sybase user's group representative, and other SUG-TX members. A good time was had by all. A major highlight of the evening was watching Bill and Don arm wrestle the drink tab...
November 23, 2004 The Sybase Users' Group of Texas held their meeting on Tuesday, November 23rd with a presentation on Sybase Dynamic Archive , a product strategy for maximizing the performance of online transaction processing systems. In the presentation Bill discussed the life cycle of data, data growth, Sybase's vision of dynamic archiving, various architectural options, the data lifecycle assessment process, while answering many questions.

Sybase Dynamic Archive supports an environment of total data lifecycle management, enabling enterprises to reduce the size of application production databases, improve application performance, speed up maintenance activities, and reducing the costs associated with storage and maintenance.

Meeting Resources:
October 26, 2004 The Sybase Users' Group of Texas held their meeting on Tuesday, October 26th with a presentation on PowerDesigner 10.0. Matt Creason gave an excellent presentation on the product, including a discussion of its leading market share position and domination of the Gartner Group's Magic Quadrant for design tools in 2004.

Matt's talk was relevant to DBAs, application developers and enterprise architects. He discussed the PowerDesigner integrated modeling environment, trends in integrated modeling, and the ways of that different users are able to effectively use PowerDesigner based upon their backgrounds, technical environment, and location in the systems development lifecycle.

Matt demonstrated conceptual, physical, and object oriented modeling, as well as several advanced topics, including the integration of the Eclipse IDE with PowerDesigner, Visual BASIC scripting, and advanced code database generation techniques. Matt also demonstrated the round trip engineering of PowerBuilder applications to and from UML.

Matt's presentation was refreshing, because the entire presentation was done live in the PowerDesigner product, and a wealth of information was presented. There were also a number of PowerDesigner tee shirts given out to audience participants.

Meeting Resources:
September 28, 2004 The Sybase Users' Group of Texas held their meeting on Tuesday, September 28th, conducting a round table discussion on "PowerBuilder to Web Strategies" and other innovative Uses of PowerBuilder.

Don Clayton, President of SUG-TX, welcomed everyone to the meeting.  The group went around the room and introduced themselves and held a Q&A session.

Don started the discussions by reviewing the various approaches to moving PowerBuilder to the web.  Don's slides are available as a PowerPoint show. Covered approaches included the "screen scraping" in Appeon® for PowerBuilder®, Application Partitioning (the process of moving PowerBuilder business logic to business objects for subsequent deployment to the middle tier) and PowerBuilder NVOs as SOAP-based Web Services. The Appeon® for PowerBuilder® discussion proved to be especially lively as the group debated the pros and cons of the approach and when and where Appeon is a good fit.  There may have even been some converts to the Appeon fan club. The Web Services 101 discussion reviewed the advantages to the SOAP Protocol (HTTP, XML, etc.) in a distributed environment and the composition of the SOAP Message. Don also touched on the security considerations and how each web service participant is involved (provider, UDDI, client). Using PowerBuilder to both build and consume web services is where things got interesting... consider the sheer power and opportunities available to the average PowerBuilder developer.

Don then turned the discussion over to Bryan Roberts of Intertech Consulting, Inc. who reviewed a real-world example of integrating PowerBuilder with other technologies and languages, including an innovative use of PowerBuilder in the middle tier.  Bryan outlined the aging production system and the need for it to be retooled using PowerBuilder and EAServer. The final solution was made up of an existing PowerBuilder client that connected to the EAServer containing unmodified C++ business logic components.  Those server components in turn communicated with the database through a custom PowerBuilder Data Abstraction Layer (DAL) component.  But, why PowerBuilder? "It's the DataWindow... stupid! "  A PowerBuilder component, using dynamically created DataWindows, was able to efficiently package and return the data in any format or layout using the native power of the DataWindow. Code that would have taken a number of weeks to develop in C++ took only days in PowerBuilder.

Rick George of Parkelle, Inc. closed out the discussions with a review of his experiences using the EAF framework to move PowerBuilder to the web. Rick reviewed the architecture (browser, web server, JSP engine, PB components, and database) of the typical web application, the challenges of moving to the web and some advantages of using EAF. He also highlighted some of the more interesting administrative and development features of EAF such as the Variable Manager, Email Manager, PDF & Excel Reporting, Enhanced Error Messaging, Global Logging and the Log Viewer.

Meeting Resources:
August 27, 2004 The Sybase Users' Group of Texas held their meeting on Tuesday, August 24th with a presentation on the activities and announcements at TechWave 2004, recently held in Orlando, FL.

Don Clayton, President of SUG-TX, welcomed everyone to the meeting. The group went around the room and introduced themselves and held a Q&A session. Don introduced Cindy Bean, SUG-TX Secretary and ISUG (International Sybase User Group) President, who discussed the activities that ISUG was involved in at TechWave. Cindy presented the ISUG Innovation and Achievement Awards during the opening keynote session. This year's winners were Sethu Meenakshisundaram of Sybase, and Bruce Armstrong of Integrated Data Services and TeamSybase. A special award was presented to Luc Van der Veurst for his ten years of service on the ISUG Board of Directors. ISUG also held their annual members meeting, staffed the ISUG booth in the exhibit hall, sponsored a user group officer luncheon, and held the annual Enhancements/Ask the Expert sessions. The ISUG Board of Directors were very busy during the conference. Cindy also reviewed the database announcements made during the conference, including the beta of ASE 15.0.

Next, Don reviewed the conference announcements around the tools products. PowerBuilder 10 was released just prior to TechWave and the keynotes discussed the roadmap for PowerBuilder 11. Don went on to describe Sybase's current strategy for their tools, including PowerBuilder, PowerDesigner, EAServer, and Appeon.

Kathy Ridley, SUG-TX Treasurer and ISUG Enhancements Director, discussed the latest on the ISUG enhancements process and the new design partner program. Kathy showed the enhancements area on the ISUG web site and how the process works. The design partner program allows Sybase customers to participate up front with Sybase engineering during the design of new functionality.

Check www.sybase.com/techwave2004 for more information on TechWave 2004 and www.isug.com for more information on ISUG.

Meeting Resources:
July 27, 2004 The Sybase Users' Group of Texas held their July meeting on Tuesday, July 27th with a special presentation on PowerBuilder 9 and 10 by John Strano, Technology Evangelist with Sybase, Inc.

Don Clayton, President of SUG-TX, welcomed everyone to the meeting. The group held a short Q&A session so we could give our speaker the extra time. Don introduced John Strano, a Sybase Technology Evangelist and a charter member of TeamSybase. John has been using PowerBuilder since 1991 and has authored articles for multiple industry periodicals. John has presented Sybase tools on an international basis since 1997. Over the last 13 years John has developed a variety of PowerBuilder applications from single-user systems scaling up to enterprise-class, web-based projects.

John presented an overview of the features introduced in PowerBuilder 9.0 such as RAD JSP Authoring, PowerBuilder XML WEB DataWindow, PowerBuilder Document Object Model, PowerBuilder Native Interface, and Web Service Support. Next was a presentation and demo of the features just released in PowerBuilder 10.0. Those features included Unicode PowerBuilder, PowerDesigner Plug-in, UDDI Support in the Web Services Wizard, XML Web DataWindow, VB.Net or C# Application using DataWindows built from scratch, ShareData Graph DataWindows Example, and Order Entry Application. Java demos included PowerBuilder EJB Client Support, Deployment of PowerBuilder business logic to a J2EE server, PowerDesigner Object Modeling capabilities for Java languages, and the future of PowerBuilder as a Java Virtual Machine language.
June 22, 2004 Bryan Roberts and Don Clayton of Intertech Consulting, Inc. presented Appeon for PowerBuilder 2.7.

Appeon PowerBuilder Edition 2.7 was designed to move existing PowerBuilder applications to the Web. Appeon automatically generates n-tier Web applications from the native source code of PowerBuilder applications, using HTML and XML to precisely replicate the UI and UI logic of the PowerBuilder application.

Bryan presented an especially impressive set of demonstrations of the Appeon product. In addition to demonstrating the Appeon sample applications and configuration tools, Bryan worked through a real life example of moving a PowerBuilder application to the web, including analyzing the application for web suitability, making changes to the PowerBuilder application, deploying the application to Appeon, and running the deployed application. For more information regarding the Appeon for PowerBuilder product, or Intertech Consulting's assessment and migration services, contact Don Clayton (Intertech Consulting, Inc.) at (713) 586-6481.

The resulting web-enabled applications reside in EAServer as a combination of HTML, XML, and web components. Appeon is also an extremely productive environment for PowerBuilder developers wanting to rapidly build new applications for the web. Appeon PowerBuilder 2.7 can transform client/server applications into Web applications with the click of a button. Appeon combines the development productivity of PowerBuilder, the openness and performance of EAServer, with the automation of Appeon workbench for an immediate return on investment.

More...

Meeting Resources:
May 2004 No meeting was held this month due to the Memorial Holiday.
God bless our troops and God bless the United States of America.
April 2004 The Sybase Users' Group of Texas held their April meeting on Tuesday, April 27th. Don Clayton of Intertech Consulting, Inc. presented various perspectives on application development using Sybase's tools and technologies. Don presented a decision matrix for PowerBuilder along with a detailed discussion of the options available to companies, including when and how to migrate to newer versions of PowerBuilder and the PowerBuilder features can be best leveraged with different versions...

Meeting Resources:
March 23, 2004 The March meeting featured Joseph Shaffner, Regional Technical Manager with the Sybase Enterprise Solutions Division in Bethesda, Maryland. Joe offered a fascinating look into the Sybase IQ product as only a true product expert can offer and discussed some of the challenges of data warehousing, Sybase's approach, the dimensions of "Data Liquidity" as it relates to warehousing data, traditional row-based DBMSs...

Joe mentioned that the IQ product customer base grew by 125% last year, and now includes such data intensive customers as the IRS, (ugh, it's tax time again), AOL, GSK, and the FCC...

Storage efficiency and query efficiency are two big advantages of IQ. Database loading is much faster than with traditional DBMSs, and scalability is essentially linear per CPU, resulting in Disk Input-Output Efficiency...

Meeting Resources:
February 24, 2004 The Sybase Users' Group of Texas held their meeting on Tuesday, February 24th.  SUG-TX President, Don Clayton, welcomed everyone to the meeting. The group started with an open question and answer period before the scheduled topic.

For the schedule topic, Joe Weinman of Bradmark Technologies presented NORAD Surveillance for Sybase ASE and Replication Server. Joe showed the group how NORAD works to monitor your ASE and Replication Servers and allows you to send alerts when it detects problems. Joe showed how you can customize NORAD and how the historical repository works. For more information, visit www.bradmark.com.
January 20, 2004 The Sybase Users' Group of Texas held their first meeting of 2004 on Tuesday, January 20th. SUG-TX President, Don Clayton, welcomed everyone to the meeting.

The purpose of the meeting was to plan for 2004 and hold officer elections. Officer elections were held and the new officers for 2004 are:

President - Don Clayton, Intertech Consulting
Vice President - Bernie Dy, MI Drilling
Treasurer - Kathy Ridley, Adea Solutions
Secretary - Cindy Bean, BMC Software

A discussion was held on possible meeting topics for 2004 and whether any changes needed to be made to the meeting format. The meetings will now be held on the 4th Tuesday of the month, from 4:30pm - 6:30pm, still at HAL-PC. Sybase has some exciting products coming out this year so watch for future meeting topics.
December 16, 2003 Instead of our monthly, we held our annual Holiday Party at the Sherlock's Baker Street Pub from 4:00pm - 6:00pm on 10001 Westheimer Road.

We had a hopping good time exchanging stories, swapping tales and making contacts. Next year, you should make a point to join us... you won't be disappointed!
November 18, 2003 Due to extenuating circumstances, the Sybase Users' Group of Texas will not hold their November meeting. Stay tuned for our holiday party in December.
October 21, 2003 Don presented on the Pocket PowerBuilder Features. The presentation included an overview of the mobile computing landscape, the key features of Pocket PowerBuilder, developing applications with Pocket PowerBuilder, and related technologies. Don even demonstrated how easy it is to develop an application for the Pocket PC...

Meeting Resources:
September 16, 2003 Cynthia Gill presented on the benefits of ISUG (check out http://www.sugtx.org/Membership.stm for a complete list of benefits) and the creation of a Virtual Users' Group with two SIGs, one related to the Sybase Impact products and the other related to EDI/HIPAA...

Bill Couch discussed the initial meeting of the Impact SIG and the use of the Sybase Impact product at St. Luke's Episcopal Health Systems. St. Lukes is using the Impact product to integrate over 200 disparate systems at St. Lukes...

Meeting Resources:
August 19, 2003 TechWave Review of Sybase Technologies by SUGTX President, Don Clayton, and other great information such as...
» ISUG activities by Cindy Bean, ISUG President and SUG-TX Secretary, and
» ISUG enhancements by Kathy Ridley, ISUG Enhancements Director.
July 15, 2003 Cancelled due to Hurricane Claudette and the inability of our speaker to travel from Dallas.
June 17, 2003 Scott Stone and Michael Eleftheriades of Quest Software presented a preview of Spotlight for Sybase ASE
May 20, 2003 John Strano, Sybase PowerBuilder Evangelist and member of TeamSybase, presented an overview of PowerBuilder 9.0 and a sneak peak at Pocket PowerBuilder.
April 15, 2003 Cancelled due to scheduling.
March 18, 2003 Matt Creason of Sybase presented Appeon 2.5, a technology that allows PowerBuilder applications to be moved easily to the Web.
February 18, 2003 Don Clayton presented PowerDesigner 9.5. Don reviewed conceptual modeling, physical modeling, then object modeling. It was a very informative session on PowerDesigner. A copy of PowerDesigner was raffled off, and Sam Ramirez was the winner.
January 21, 2003 The attending members and visitors held a planning session and discussed the what topics should be targeted for 2003. The replies included sessions on PowerBuilder 9.0 and ASE 12.5.03. The second topic was a preview of DBXray for ASE by Cindy Bean from BMC Software. Cindy presented the benefits and demonstrated DBXray for ASE that will be released soon with ASE 12.5.03.

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