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SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services SP1 Delivers New Functionality
Microsoft this week delivered its first service pack for SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services, a business intelligence add-on to its relational database management system that integrates with Microsoft Office and allows users to create, manage, and deliver reports using either paper or the Web. SP1 includes a roll-up of bug fixes released since the product's release in January, as well as new features such as support for exporting reports to Excel 97 and 2000, improvements in PDF rendering, and new control over series and data point styles in charts. SP1 updates all four editions of Reporting Services, including Enterprise, Developer, Standard, and Evaluation. More than 75,000 instances of the software have been downloaded since January, Microsoft says. Reporting Services SP1 can be downloaded from Microsoft's site.
MKS Guarantees Success in Porting Apps to Windows from Linux or Unix
Organizations interested in migrating their Unix or Linux applications to Windows can get a free one-hour consultation with a porting expert if they try out a porting tool. MKS last week announced "Guaranteed Success," which provides those who evaluate MKS Toolkit for Enterprise Developers with a free hour-long consultation with an MKS porting consultant, along with three more one-hour sessions if they license the software. The MKS Toolkit for Enterprise Developers (formerly NuTCRACKER) is collection of APIs, utilities, and a runtime environment that allows developers to recompile C, C++, and Fortran code as native Windows executables that look and act like regular Windows applications. MKS is also offering a partial refund on the cost of the MKS Toolkit for Enterprise Developers, which goes for $5,000 for a single-user license, if the migration doesn't work within 90 days.
Earthquake Highlights Lack of Preparedness Among L.A. Companies
It was an eerily prescient finding. One day before a magnitude 5.2 earthquake rolled through Southern California last week, telecommunications provider AT&T announced results of a survey that found 35 percent of companies in the Los Angeles metropolitan area are completely unprepared for a disaster. While the temblor, which was situated about 60 miles offshore in the Pacific Ocean, didn't cause any damage (save for the evacuation of Sea World and frayed nerves in a few thousand souls), it served to highlight the ongoing tenuousness of business continuity in susceptible regions of this country. The report, "Disaster Planning in the Private Sector: A Post 9/11 Look at the State of Business Continuity in the U.S.," which was based on interviews with business continuity executives at 100 Los Angeles firms, found that 35 percent of business have no disaster recovery plans. "About a third of Los Angeles companies don't seem to think they're vulnerable," said Ken Allen, executive director for Partnership for Public Warning, which is working with AT&T on disaster planning. "That's a dangerously naïve position to take, especially when you consider history." The report also found that 20 percent of companies surveyed had suffered a disaster serious enough for them to close down for some period of time. The most common culprit for shutting down was found to be earthquakes, with a 35 percent share, followed closely by fires, which caused 10 percent of the shutdowns. "Local companies without business continuity plans should make it a priority to develop them," Allen said. "They need to focus on protecting the networks their businesses rely on and securing critical applications and data to keep their businesses up and running."
VMware Releases Experimental Support for 64-bit x86
The VMware division of EMC announced yesterday that an experimental update to its VMware Workstation virtual machine partitioning for workstations and the similar GSX Server partitioning for servers is now available supporting Opteron and Xeon-64 machines. Specifically, GSX Server 3.1 and Workstation 4.5.2 will be released this week in an experimental state with support for the beta version of Microsoft Windows Server 2003 for the 64-bit architectures embodied in the Advanced Micro Devices Opteron and Intel Xeon with Extended Memory 64 Technology.
VMware's expertise is on X86 architectures, and until Itanium takes off, EMC is not prepared to invest in supporting Itanium. The 64-bit experimental support for VMware partitions also covers the 64-bit versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 and Novell SuSE Linux Enterprise Server 8. Both GSX Server 3.1 and Workstation 4.5.2 are available as free updates to existing customers who want to run in 64-bit mode. Right now, the 64-bit support is an all-or-nothing proposition: customers cannot yet mix 64-bit and 32-bit operating systems as guest environments on 64-bit machines, but this is a feature that VMware is working on for the final release of the product. VMware has not yet said when the commercial support for 64-bits is expected.
Daimler-Chrysler IT Exec: Oracle Acquisition of PeopleSoft Would Hurt
The Department of Justice's case for blocking the acquisition of PeopleSoft by Oracle got a boost last week, when a Daimler-Chrysler IT executive testified that it would harm his company to the tune of $50 million to $100 million if it was forced to replace its PeopleSoft application if rival Oracle's bid succeeded and it proceeded to neglect the software. Although Oracle wasn't invited to bid for a contract with Daimler-Chrysler, which considered only PeopleSoft and SAP for a recently installed human resources package, having Oracle in the wings increased Daimler-Chrysler's bargaining power, testified Michael Gorriz, the manufacturer's vice president of information technology. "I think there was a benefit to having three independent competitors in the market," Gorriz was quoted by CNET as saying in court. Although Oracle has since committed to supporting PeopleSoft's Enterprise suite of applications for at least 10 years, including the OS/400-based applications PeopleSoft acquired from J.D. Edwards, it is hard to entirely forget Oracle's preliminary pledge to kill its competitors' products if it ever got its hands on them, which is exactly what it said in the days immediately following its hostile takeover bid about a year ago.
Web Services: Programmers Say Spanning Platforms More Vital Than Spanning Languages
According to a new survey on Web services programming conducted by Evans Data, what programmers really want is a Web services programming environment that spans many platforms, and they are not so much concerned with having an environment that spans many languages. The survey of more than 500 programmers indicated that they were just about evenly split into Java and Microsoft .NET camps, but 70 percent of them said that what they really valued was a platform that would work on any operating system platform. Having an environment that spans many languages is not as important.
That would seem to imply that Java, which runs on all modern platforms, has an edge against Microsoft's .NET and Common Language Runtime environment, which is officially only supported on Windows but is being cloned for Linux and Unix through the Mono open source project. CLR is very slick in that it can run C#, Visual Basic, C, C++, RPG, and COBOL, among others. However, according to the Evans Data study, just about all .NET programmers use C#.
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