Ottawa Sybase User Group Meeting

The Ottawa Sybase User Group (OSUG) will be holding their next meeting on Tuesday, May 2nd, 2006. OSUG's mission is to create a Sybase community in the National Capital area where users can share knowledge, experiences and best practices. Users of all Sybase products, including data management, tools and mobility, are welcome to attend.

This meeting will feature networking opportunities, product updates and a discussion. Mr Dave Fish, Sybase's Senior technical Evangelist for PowerBuilder, InfoMaker, and PocketBuilder will be our primary guest speaker. Dave will be demonstrating the new .NET Web Services, upgraded GUI Interface, WinForm, WebForm and Smart Client .NET 2.0 support in PB 10.5 and 11. He will also be showing the new PocketBuilder 2.04, DataWindow.Net 2.0 for VisualStudio2005 and PB 2006/2007 roadmap.

The North American Regional User Group Director (Joe Burger) from the International Sybase User Group (ISUG) will also be joining us on May 2nd and will be making a special 15 minute presentation. Afterwards, come and ask Joe about ISUG and how you can get copies of: copy of: DataWindow.NET 2.0, PocketBuilder 2.0.4, PowerBuilder 10.5 , SQL Anywhere Studio 9; IQ 12 ;Pylon 5; EAServer 5.3; and ASE 15 .... all for $75!!!!!

For detailed information, see Chris Pollach's blog.

PowerBuilder 11 Customer Technology Preview (CTP)

Sybase just announced a public Customer Technology Preview for PowerBuilder 11. The CTP program is designed to involve customers and partners, before a formal beta period, to facilitate timely and relevant feedback into the product development cycle. They are providing this early build to their extensive technical community of developers to enable the largest number of users possible to test the .NET WebForm deployment feature.

Your participation in the CTP program will give you the opportunity to test-drive this new functionality for yourself and see your existing applications run in a browser. Deliver proofs of concept for your projects, and help them ensure they are including the key features and functionality customers require.

Sign up here!

DataWindow.Net 2.0

Sybase released version 2.0 of DataWindow.Net. The new version:

• supports the .NET Framework 2.0


• accepts DataSets and DataTables as data sources


• introduces new properties and functionality, including autosize height on all parts of a DataWindow


• introduces a new presentation style, the TreeView, for easily presenting hierarchical data


• updates support for database connectivity, including Oracle and ADO.NET


• updates icons


• add a new DatePicker edit mask for putting calendar functionality into a data field


• enhanced DropDownDataWindows used in Web applications

Even more useful utilities…

I already mentioned Silurian as one option for examining the exports from DLLs. Another option is PE Explorer. Like Silurian, it handles both exports:



And resource information:

Ottawa Sybase User Group Meeting

David Dichman, Senior Sybase Product Manager for PowerDesigner, will be the guest speaker at the Ottawa Sybase User Group (OSUG) meeting on Tuesday, April 4th, 2006. PowerDesigner is one of the worlds premier Business / Data Modeling tools and Sybase has just released version 12.0. Mr. Dichman will demonstrate why the 2005 Gartner group report concluded PowerDesigner is the number one modeling tool.

Brute force pbtrace.log processing (revisited)

An update to my previous post on using Excel to parse a pbtrace.log file.

The problem with the function in the second column is that it's trying to find the last occurance of a "(", and it's doing it by assuming that it can start at a certain fixed position before the end of the string. That turns out to be an issue.

Excel doesn't have a LastPos function, but VBA does. So you can create a VBA macro that does a LastPos and then call that from an Excel function. Launch the VBA editor in Excel, and then create a function as:

Public Function FindRev(sFind_Text As String, sWithin_Text As String) As Integer
FindRev = InStrRev(sWithin_Text, sFind_Text, -1, vbTextCompare)
End Function

Now in the second column, use this function instead:

=IF(A1>0,FindRev("(",D1),0)

The other thing you may want to consider is adding Conditional Formatting to Column C in order to make the problemattic statements more obvious. Select Column C, select Format-> Conditional Formatting from the menu, and then enter your criteria. In this example, I'm setting the background color of the cell to red if the statement took more that 1000 milliseconds (1 second):

Deja Vu all over again…

Back in the late 1980's I was using a data management tool known as DataEase. At the time it was a DOS based tool that communicated only with its own proprietary database files. Essentially a competitor to dBase, but one that was more network aware and provided better screen generation capability.