Revelation has announced Universal Driver 4.6 targeted at organizations running multi-user Revelation-based applications on a Windows Server. Revelation will be releasing two versions of Universal Driver 4.6, including a free version for customers who have purchased a license for OpenInsight 9.0; and there also is a new installer with this version, Robert Catalano, director of sales at Revelation, tells 5 Minute Briefing.
In Universal Driver 4.6 also, notes Mike Ruane, president and CEO of Revelation, "We have enhanced the support for large key sizes and large records. There are certain situations where parts of the system would handle it correctly and other parts may have treated it as a bug, giving you false errors." As Revelation's customers' data sets are increasing in size, they are starting to put more and more intelligence into the keys, which is making them longer, and so users are coming across this issue more often, he explains.
The Universal Driver 4.6 provides backward compatibility with all previous versions of Linear Hash files which is not available with the Universal Driver 3.0. Also included with the Universal Driver 4.6 is a console application (the LH Manager) that allows users to manage record locks without having to stop the Linear Hash Service, as well as view the active connections to users' applications.
The Universal Driver 4.6 replaces the Universal Driver 4.5. Upgrades from the UD 4.0 and UD 4.5 to the UD 4.6 are free although shipping charges apply.
In Universal Driver 4.6, NSIS replaces Install Shield as the installer. The two versions of Universal Driver 4.6 include a free bundled version supplied with OpenInsight 9.0 and above network user licenses, and the standard version to be used with OpenInsight 8.0.x and below. The free bundled version will only work with OpenInsight 9.0 and above network user licenses; it will not function with versions of OpenInsight 8.0.x and below as well as Advanced Revelation.
The Universal Driver 4.6 will no longer support unlimited-length record keys. Record keys can now be a maximum of 512 characters long. Any keys that exceed this limit will now be "illegal" and applications will be unable to either read or write them. The server event log will report Linear Hash error 1016 for this condition. Since this will make the records unreadable, they will be treated as though there is a "group format error" (GFE) in any table that contains them, and so the Database Manager tool in OpenInsight release 9.0.1 to Verify LH has also been updated to report there "errors", and the "fix" option has been updated to copy them to a new table called DUMP_FIX_SAVE.
And, in the more critical fix, according to Revelation, currently, the "Fix GFEs" option on the Verify LH menu silently considers any records with keys greater than 50 characters long to be GFEs. Anyone running the "Fix GFEs" option, either from Verify LH menu, will lose any records that have keys longer than 50 characters. As a result of this issue, Revelation is including with the Universal Driver 4.6 a RDK containing a FIX_LH routine. This updated routine removes the "50-character-throwaway" functionality and replaces it with the "512-character-save" functionality.
And, in Revelation training news, notes Ruane, "We are announcing our new ‘Introduction to WebOI' course." The class will be available as part of the fall training schedule. More information is available here.