by Joel Starkman		The Director's Chair
		Advanced Technique
		From FOCUS to WebFOCUS
		Feature Preview
		New Feature
		FOC101
		Feature
		FOCUS – Then and Now
		Releases Currently Shipping and Latest Certifications
		User Group Meeting Schedule

Spring 2006 The division is engaged in heavy development and testing of new features as we approach the upcoming 7.6 release of FOCUS and WebFOCUS, which will be the first release where FOCUS and WebFOCUS (and iWay) share the same numbering, as well as the same code under the hood. Attendees of Summit in April will see previews of features from this new release. In the last issue of TFC, I alluded to a faster FOCUS on the horizon. That horizon is now much closer, with Release 7.6 scheduled to arrive "on your supermarket shelves" in a few short months. In benchmarking the new release, which employs the IBM/C compiler, we have seen gains of 5 percent to 40 percent in CPU performance depending on the aspect of FOCUS used in the application. In brief, report processing via TABLE improved about 5 percent to 10 percent, MODIFY database maintenance processes improved about 30 percent to 40 percent, and utilities, such as REBUILD, improved over 40%. These gains resulted purely from changing the compilation tool and were independent of code changes in the product. A white paper describing the test cases and containing details of the benchmark process and the resulting measurements is now available. From these results you should be able to extrapolate the environmental parameters to your own production application scenarios and estimate performance gains you might achieve in upgrading to Release 7.6. Release 7.6 also contains over 70 new features, drawn from WebFOCUS and iWay releases 5.3, 7.1.1, and 7.6 – all of which went production after FOCUS Release 7.3 was issued. My top features in this list are: Multidimensional Indexing (MDI) for FOCUS and XFOCUS databases which offers virtually instant reporting access to large volumes of data. A customer who used MDI on another platform reported report runtimes dropped from three hours to two minutes. Incredible! ACROSS summarizations permit specification of row columns to be totaled and automatically “rolled up,” providing functional parity with vertical recalculations done with BY...SUMMARIZE. FOCREPLAY: this new tool records – that is, scripts – interactive FOCUS sessions so you can replay them in batch as if they were online! At batch speeds, you can quickly test interactive production applications against new FOCUS releases or service packs, or run batch tests when installing a new operating system level or a third-party DBMS tool upgrade. A great time-saver. Lots of raised limits, such as unlimited FOCSORT size, 256 segments in one structure, 63 simultaneous JOINs, and more MATCH files in one request. The articles in this issue of TFC run the gamut from simple to advanced, and from past to present to future. The TOTAL syntax, as in WHERE TOTAL and BY/ACROSS TOTAL, are very powerful reporting features, as Dan Gaboda demonstrates with practical examples. Then and Now from Jay Patrick strikes a historical chord about HOLD files. Walter Blood describes alternatives when considering moving applications from FOCUS to WebFOCUS. Noreen simplifies the concepts in manipulating date-time values. Should you need to estimate the future size of your FOCUS file, read Cesare Petrizio's article on using the CALCFILE utility. Another article by Noreen shows how to do basic validity checks on sink databases before you restart the sink machine. I look forward to greeting those of you who attend Summit this year and hope everyone enjoys the change of season and continues through a healthy year.