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May 2005
What does May mean to you? Warm weather, flowers, Memorial Day in the U.S. (May 30), swimming, Summit, boating, fishing…wait a minute – how did Summit sneak onto the list? Well, I guess it's as much a part of May as anything else if you're in or around Information Builders.
As this is our 30th anniversary, Tech Summit is sure to be quite an event this year. Our program has expanded with more hands-on labs, a new play-with-the-products Sandbox (sounds like fun!), and newly devised hands-off workshops too, all meant to expose a broader audience to a wider range of instructor-guided product-training experiences. Not to mention the Rio Hotel and Casino one of my favorite places in Las Vegas. Presentation-wise, my staff and I have quite a lineup on the FOCUS track at Summit: The FOCUS Roundtable (featuring Peter Mittelman, VP, FOCUS Division), the new FOCLOG tool for site-wide FOCUS activity monitoring, my annual Olympics challenge to all of you self-proclaimed FOCUS experts, a preview of the Structured HOLD File feature, insights on how best to exploit the new larger XFOCUS files, and special training in Modify and Reporting internals.
I'll just mention in addition that we are working on the next release of FOCUS, due early in 2006, which will not only include all applicable WebFOCUS 7.1 features, but is primarily targeted at taking advantage of new IBM compiler advances to boost FOCUS performance by as much as 20 percent across the board – maybe more depending on the application. I, for one, am greatly looking forward to that! More details will follow as the year progresses.
I'll give a full report on Tech Summit in the next issue of Table File Car. Right now, you have this issue to read, so let me not keep you from it. There's yet another set of useful and timely articles, like the "101" on how to use -REPEAT loops in Dialogue Manager, a preview of the pending Structured HOLD File feature that actually retains the structure of the data in a flat-file extract, more McGyver techniques for conquering otherwise impossible reports, easy duplex printing with the NEWPAGE feature, and a guide to sources of online and printed FOCUS documentation and timely product notes you may not have known about.
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