UniVerse Release 11

Two important new announcements from Rocket this week.


The first is the imminent release of UniVerse 11. This is the first full release to bear the Rocket brand and the first full release of UniVerse in some time, so in many ways this sets the tone for future expectations - and I have to say, this sounds very positive. It is clear that Rocket is listening to its users and that the promised development freedom is beginning to bear fruit.

The U2 team have clearly not been resting on their laurels. There are some welcome new additions and extensions to the products, and the good news is that this takes in both the front end features and also some core functionality that has been missing or simply become outdated.

At the core level, we see changes to the MQ interface to support the current API in place of the deprecated AMI interface. This is a change that won’t affect many sites but for those who rely on message queues it is a welcome relief and sends a strong signal in terms of support. I’ll be writing in Spectrum about this new interface. Added to this are extensions to make the UCI layer fully ODBC 3 compatible – another welcome piece of backfill.

Then there are some pieces that will truly strengthen the product. Replication has had an overhaul – this has often been seen as a less than optimal part of the product: following the changes Rocket can now announce high availability with fast switchover and read-only copies for reporting and data warehousing down to the account level.

Data encryption has been extended with keys and indices now getting the encryption treatment and additional protection for master keys available – sites can now require more than one password to unlock the master key, preventing a single disgruntled employee from wrecking the master.

Sign-on now supports both PAM and LDAP for authentication.

Then we come to the big ticket items. Rocket is continuing the theme of embracing Eclipse for administration and development seen in BDT and WebDE, and now added a new administration interface to the mix (XAdmin) – of which I will post more later.

And we also see the release of EDA. For those not familiar with this latest term, this adds External Data Access to UniVerse, allowing seamless access to external sources such as SQL Server and Oracle under the guise of UniVerse tables. UniVerse is not the first to add this facility – it has been part of jBASE and mvON for many years. Again, this deserves a post in its own right.

As if getting the new Universe release out was not enough, members of the U2 User Group will already have received a newsflash regarding another tool to come out of Rocket in the same timeframe – DataVu. This is the first evidence of the collaboration between the U2 team and the other technologies that sit under the Rocket banner – in the case, an adaptation of CorVu, a BI tool for key indicators. David Jordon has been looking into this – see the post on the U2UG website for more details.

Good news all round, and thumbs up to the Rocket crew.