Simba Technologies' CEO Corner

The new efficiency/normal according to Steve Ballmer

I was reading Steve Ballmer's latest email entitled "The New Efficiency" (http://www.microsoft.com/mscorp/execmail/2009/09-29NewEfficiency.mspx) in which he basically says the new normal in business is that "people borrow less, save more, and spend with much greater caution."  This is a simple yet powerful premise to do more with less.  At Simba, we have always tried to help our customers do more with less.  Simba started out helping ISVs deliver custom ODBC and JDBC drivers to their customers to increase value.  With our ODBC and JDBC SDKs, our ISV customers were able to quickly and efficiently build open standards based data connectivity for their databases which then gave their customers tremendous advantage in they could now use a wide variety of applications with these databases.  Then, Simba broadened what we did by also adding an OLAP SDK that supports ODBO and XMLA.  Today, Simba is going a step further.  We are now adding value directly for enterprise customers.  Our new MDX Provider for Oracle OLAP lets any user of Oracle OLAP connect to their data directly from Microsoft Excel.  The user gets to leverage all the power of Excel and Oracle OLAP without having to either use an Excel spreadsheet add-in which requires learning new software or a separate mid-tier server which can be quite expensive and take time to install and configure.

ODBC 3.80 is here!

Finally, ODBC 3.80 is here!  According to Pak-Ming Cheung from Microsoft, “We’re excited to announce that version 3.8 of the Microsoft ODBC DM (Driver Manager) will be released in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2”.  You can read more in his blog post at: http://blogs.msdn.com/data/archive/2009/07/06/odbc-dm-3-80-in-windows-7-and-windows-server-2008-r2.aspx.

 

Basically, there are 4 main new features in ODBC 3.80:

1.       Streamed Output Parameters

2.       ODBC C-Type Extensibility

3.       Asynchronous Connection Operation

4.       Better Management in ODBC Connection Pooling

 

As a leader in the data connectivity space in general and ODBC in particular, Simba is definitely committed to supporting ODBC 3.80.  If you would like more information, please don’t hesitate to contact us to discuss further.

ODBC Driver for Microsoft HealthVault

At Simba, we have a SDK to build a custom ODBC driver.  We have been working with Microsoft HealthVault and decided to use our ODBC SDK to build a custom ODBC driver for Microsoft HealthVault using their webservice API.  For those of you who are not familiar with Microsoft HealthVault, it is a secure online storage for all of your healthcare data.  You can get more information here: http://www.healthvault.com.  This is a very cool concept to be able to store all of your healthcare information in the Cloud and have access to it from wherever you are.  You have total control and privacy and only people you authorize can view your data.

 

HealthVault has a nice webservice API for developers and it was pretty easy to take our ODBC SDK and build an ODBC driver for HealthVault - it took us around two weeks to build this driver.  We found there were a lot of very good use cases for the HealthVault ODBC driver. For example, consider a diabetic person.  This person can buy a blood glucose meter from various companies that will allow them to connect to HealthVault and upload their daily blood glucose levels http://www.healthvault.com/personal/devices.html?type=device. Then, this person can use the HealthVault ODBC driver to pull this information into Excel and chart the data so they can easily see how they are doing. Another example is an athlete who wants to track their heart rate and how much they are running. Again, there are devices that will track this information and allow easy uploads to HealthVault from where they can use the ODBC driver to pull data to Excel and easily track their progress.

 

Simba is supporting Microsoft HealthVault by allowing free usage of our HealthVault ODBC driver for personal use.  You can get more information or download the ODBC driver here: http://www.simba.com/ODBC-Driver-for-HealthVault.htm.

 

Since our ODBC SDK allows any software developer to easily build a custom ODBC and/or JDBC driver for any data source including ISAM, XML, object oriented, SCADA, or cloud data source, it was very easy for us to build the HealthVault ODBC driver.  If you can think of other things we could build an ODBC driver for, we would love to hear from you. (Especially, if you think it cannot be done)

ODBC 3.8

I wrote a while ago that ODBC continues to be a very important data connectivity interface: http://blogs.simba.com/simba_technologies_ceo_co/2007/11/odbc-rocks.html.  It has been over a decade since Microsoft last updated the ODBC specification and now with Windows 7, they are introducing ODBC 3.8.  There is a brief mention of it the the Microsoft SQL Server Native Client team blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/sqlnativeclient/archive/2009/01/17/odbc-3-8-is-in-beta-1-of-the-windows-7-sdk.aspx.  The main new features of ODBC 3.8 are: 

- executing connection operations asynchronously

- streamed output parameters

- ODBC C data type extensibility

 

These seem to be features driven by SQL Server but most interesting is that the good folks at Microsoft are continuing to invest in ODBC which continues to be the de-facto open standard for relational database connectivity.

ODBC Rocks

I read the article entitled “ODBC Rocks” on the CoDe Magazine website and I wanted to comment on it. The full article is at “http://www.code-magazine.com/article.aspx?quickid=990712172&page=1”. This is a very good article written by Chris Lee who is a Program Manager at Microsoft. Chris made some very good points:

1. "Fifteen years after its launch, ODBC is a firmly entrenched cornerstone of the software industry.”
2. "For the data source owner, ODBC is a must.”
3. "At the time of its release, the SQL Server team at Microsoft believed OLE DB would supersede ODBC. This is no longer the case and ODBC’s future is completely secure.”

If you read my blog post of September 24th, “http://blogs.simba.com/simba_technologies_ceo_co/odbc/index.html”, I discussed why an ISV would want to build an ODBC Driver. Chris says that “for the data source owner ODBC, is a must,” and I could not agree more. If you build an ODBC driver for whatever data source you have, the data source is now open to the widest set of applications possible. This is the biggest win for any data source owner.  The more applications that your data source is exposed to, the more valuable your data source.  The business case for an ODBC driver is irrefutable.

Why build an ODBC Driver?

I often get asked by people as to why you would want to build an ODBC Driver.  Usually the people asking work for ISVs (Independent Software Vendors) that have their own database and/or reporting application.

I usually provide the following example.

Consider an ISV that sells into the financial services sector and has been making great progress licensing its proprietary database and reporting application.  The ISV’s database is high performing and very scalable.  Likewise, it has a great reporting tool that allows the customer to do some fancy analytics on the data in the database.  Overall, the product’s code is well-developed and high quality.  Everything is very modular, and everything looks good.

However, the ISV’s CEO is reviewing business and finds that the company is making largely departmental sales and that most customers only have 5-10 users of its great system.  The CEO asks one of the company’s best customers – a major bank – why it is not deploying the product further than the 10 users it has.  The customer says that it loves the system, but its other departments that could use the system want to connect to it using Microsoft Excel and Business Objects Crystal Reports.  The problem is that data needs to be extracted from the system and then fed into Excel and Crystal through flat files.

This data connectivity problem is exactly what an ODBC Driver solves.  An ISV might have a great system, yet unless standard business query, reporting and analytical applications like Excel and Crystal can connect, the system will always only serve a niche role with data stored in the system that is trapped in a silo. 

Quite simply, an ODBC Driver allows a wide variety of applications to connect to a database through a standard interface and exposes the data to the maximum number of products and users.