DataDirect OpenAccess SDK Product Features and Benefits

Key Product Features
Features to Make Your Life Easier
Comprehensive Support and Technical Expertise

Key Product Features

• Headache-Free, Binary Product - 99% of the code comes as supported binary product. In today's rapidly changing technology market, licensing enabling technology such as OpenAccess eliminates the need to build in-house expertise and maintain it. The Interface Provider (IP) is the only source code you need to be concerned about—we provide binary code for all other components. We will upgrade you with new features and all you will have to do is rebuild. DataDirect maintains the majority of the code for new versions of operating systems, compilers, and desktop API specifications. In fact, customers who used the OpenAccess SDK to build their ODBC drivers are able to support native OLE DB, JDBC, or ADO.NET without any additional coding.
• Get Up and Running Quickly - Our unique toolkit design allows any C/C++, Java, or .NET programmer without knowledge of SQL, ODBC, JDBC, OLE DB, and ADO.NET to build an interface in days. Our incremental design philosophy allows you to have an interface up and running rapidly to easily do a proof of concept. Then, based on your needs, optimization and tuning can be performed over time. After all, getting to market is job one!
• Built-in Features that Work Without Any Coding on Your Part - You support 10 simple function calls in your IP. Once the IP is complete, parameter processing, joins between tables, unions, nested queries, view, disk caching, and data conversions are available without any effort on your part.
• Scalable Optimization - OpenAccess exposes all the information you need to make use of indexes and direct access mechanisms that your database supports. You have quick access to data no matter how many rows you have in your database. Our query optimizer also breaks complex queries into multiple queries that you can process more efficiently.
• Extensive SQL Support - SQL support includes select, insert, update, delete and select for update. We support row versioning to allow Microsoft Access and other tools to efficiently insert records in a multi-user environment.
• Flexible Operating Mode - OpenAccess works in various modes to allow you to take advantage of your data sources capabilities —you can let OpenAccess do the SQL parsing and execution, just the parsing, or pure pass through.
• Support for All Data Types - Numeric, float, double, char, varchar, blob, integer, short integers, and variant.
• Support for Large Data Sets - DataDirect has customer implementations dealing with millions of records. Our feature set includes support for processing large results sets with incremental result set retrieval to the client application for "user" responsiveness and reduced server loading. Our disk caching feature allows you to control how much memory is used for intermediate processing. If this number is exceeded, then we use space on the disk to process any size requests.
• Optimized Client/Server Protocol - OpenAccess packages requests and results to allow fast transfer of commands and data between the client and the server. For example, the ODBC calls SQLExecute(), SQLFetch(), SQLClose() and SQLFreeStmt() are a single client/server transaction that can return as many rows as you configure it for. Also, since all the SQL processing is server based, only result sets are transmitted back to the client.
• Support for All Popular Platforms - DataDirect is committed to providing access to your database no matter what platform it resides on —Digital Alpha, Digital VAX, Intel, IBM RS 6000, IBM S/390, Concurrent, IBM OS/2, Sun SPARC, LINUX. DataDirect's OpenRDA network software has been ported to most popular platforms and can be easily ported to new platforms. It has been designed to be platform independent. If your data resides on many platforms then the OpenAccess SDK will let you develop the IP on one platform and then build it on all the other platforms.
• Support for ODBC, JDBC, OLE DB and ADO.NET - DataDirect is committed to providing access to your database from emerging data connectivity standards with no change to your IP. OpenAccess SDK will be the only middleware you will need to meet all your future desktop API requirements. We support these interfaces without the need for any third-party bridges to allow utilizing the full power of the specific interface standard. For example, OLE DB can be supported by using the Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC but this limits your OLE DB provider to the features of ODBC and you cannot take advantage of data types like Variant and Arrays.

Features to Make Your Life Easier

• Optimized Memory Management for 24 X 7 Operation - DataDirect takes memory management seriously to make sure you can be running 24 hours a day, seven days a week, without memory leaks or fragmentation.
• Detailed Logging of Events to File When Needed - OpenAccess allows detailed tracing at the ODBC and OLE DB levels and all the way down to your IP by turning on a configuration option. This simplifies your development effort and your support effort when customers call with problems. OpenAccess also log details of how the query processor has optimized the query —this helps you fine tune your database access.
• Easy Installation and Configuration for Your End Users - Tools are provided to easily manage the client and server software components.
• Designed for Multi-Platform Databases - OpenAcccess is set up to allow development on one platform and then to transparently build and run on all other supported platforms. We go to the extent of having a single make file that is usable on all platforms.
• Distribution Kit - Simply add your version of the server and you have a professional distribution kit. We can also supply our documentation electronically to let you customize and integrate into yours.

Comprehensive Support and Expertise

• Extensive Support - DataDirect will support you in all phases of your design, development and deployment. Our commitment to technical support includes prompt support over telephone and through e-mail. We also provide a knowledgebase of problem resolutions on our web site. We are committed to understanding your database and making sure your driver is designed for successful deployment.
• Guaranteed Compatibility with Your Customer's Desktop Tools - If for some reason our drivers do not work with a commercial 4-GL package, we will resolve it.
• Expertise in Applications and Tools that use ODBC, OLE DB, JDBC, and ADO.NET - We make it our business to know popular applications and tools like Microsoft Visual Basic, Microsoft Access, Sybase PowerBuilder, Crystal Reports, BEA webLogic, IBM webSphere, ColdFusion, Perl, Brio, Cognos, SQL Server, Oracle, ASP, ASP.NET, and many others.
• This is Our Core Business - DataDirect Technologies has been in business for nearly 20 years providing database access solutions. You can expect us to be around in the future.