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.

TechWave 2006 Call for Papers is Open

Sybase is looking for presentations for their next annual Sybase TechWave User Training and Solutions Conference, in Las Vegas, Nevada, August 6-10, 2006. If you have solved a unique business challenge utilizing Sybase products, they would like you tell the thousands of TechWave 2006 attendees about it. You can visit www.sybase.com/techwave to apply. If you are selected as a conference speaker, you will receive a complimentary conference pass valued at $1,795. Applications must be submitted no later than April 3, 2006. Sybase will notify you in April if you have been selected for a technical session. More information on track descriptions and the online application form can be found at www.sybase.com/techwave. Specific questions can be directed to sybase.techwave@sybase.com.

PowerDesigner WebCast

PowerDesigner: Aligning Business and IT
March 28 and May 9, 9am PT/12pm ET

A live webcast to help new or potential customers see how PowerDesigner can help them build or re-engineer applications quickly, cost-effectively and consistently.

World Wide PowerBuilder Survey

Novalys is doing their annual world wide PowerBuilder survey for 2006.

When you complete the survey you can see the results of last years survey.