Midrange Stuff, OS/400 Edition

Lazy Software recently issued several enhancements to Sentences, its radically different database management system for rapidly developing Internet applications. With Sentences Version 3.0, which is scheduled to ship this month, Lazy Software says it has greatly improved scalability compared with previous versions. Other announcements include the introduction of a Sentences add-on called LazyView, which aggregates data from relational databases, and the development of a new online analytical processing (OLAP) add-on by a business partner.

Lazy Software was formed several years ago by the entrepreneurial team of Simon Williams, Simon Haigh, and Melinda Horton, the same group that founded Synon and created the Synon/2 fourth-generation-language development tool for the OS/400 platform. (Synon is now owned by Computer Associates.) Following the sale of Synon, Williams set out to develop a new sort of database management system that would challenge today's relational database paradigm. The result of that effort is Sentences.

Williams led the development of Sentences with the idea that the underlying data structure provided by today's relational database management systems, and to a lesser extent object-oriented programming, is a hindrance to developing applications that are flexible enough for deployment across the Internet. Williams' answer to the problems created by those data structures is the associative model of data.

Williams' associative model of data starts by dividing everything into two categories: entities--which are actual things that cannot change, like a book--and associations, which can change, such as a book's position on a table. These entities and associations interact through the application of the two other building blocks in the associative model of data: items, which are sort of like distinct processes, and links, which connect source items and target items with an action, or a verb. Each link can be connected to another link, or an item, and in this way complicated data relationships can be spawned upward and outward. At the same time, individual statements, or chapters, can exist as stand-alone entities, while maintaining integrity through the commonality and logic carried down through the chain, or the book.

The use of concepts as entities and verbs underlines the nature of Sentences: Relationships can be described in much the same way that people communicate, through language and sentences (hence the name of the product and its parts). Williams hopes to remove some of the limitations that he sees resulting from the reliance on the relational database, such as the need to design new data tables for each new application, the multitude of procedural languages on different platforms, and the general incompatibility of unstructured data (such as multimedia files) in relational data stores.

The purpose of Sentences is to allow developers to create applications without the limitations of a relational database weighing them down. Developers could continue to develop in their preferred language, such as RPG, COBOL, or C++, while Sentences basically builds the database behind the scenes as development progresses. (For a more elaborate description of the drawbacks of the relational and object models, and the structure of the associative models, see the Lazy Software's 16-page white paper The Associative Model of Data.)

Lazy Software wrote Sentences in Java and has tested it on a number of platforms, including OS/400, AIX, Solaris, Windows, and Linux. The database management system is composed of three parts. The Sentences Explorer is a drag-and-drop development component where developers describe their associative database schemas. Dataform allows developers to view and update the links between entities and associations. Query Editor is used to create and access queries.

Sentences Version 1.0 was released in October 2000, followed by Version 2.0 in October 2001. Ramping up Sentences' scalability has been Lazy Software's main development goal with Version 3.0, and the company says it has achieved its goals with the current release. The internal structure of the Sentences database has been restructured, Lazy Software says, and disk access methods have been enhanced to significantly improve scalability, performance, and robustness. Individual chapter files in a Sentences 3.0 database can now contain more than 100 million associations, an improvement of 50 times over Sentences 2.0.

Sentences 3.0 also sports two other features that should help its standing as a tool for developing business intelligence programs. First, Lazy Software has developed an add-on called LazyView that pulls and integrates data from relational database systems, such as DB2, Oracle, and SQL Server. The company says the data aggregation provided by LazyView will provide users with a single view of data housed in disparate systems, without the requirement for data warehousing (ETL) or migration tools.

Lazy Software also announced that it is working with the British software house Digital Aspects to build an OLAP interface to Sentences, to be called Associative Analytics. This application will allow Sentences users to create data cubes within the Sentences database and to perform certain analytical operations--such as ratios, cumulative totals, trends, and allocations--to gain valuable insight from their business data.