Developer Product Briefs
Test Center Standard Edition and Connect ODBC 6.0
Products to Lower cost application performance maintenace and drive ODBC harder.
Lower Cost APM
Two months after releasing an application performance management (APM) suite that ranges in price from $30,000 to $60,000 for a starting implementation but can run into mid-six figures, Linz, Austria-based dynaTrace Software is now offering a scaleddown version. dynaTrace Test Center Standard Edition has a good portion of the application testing features found in the core dynaTrace 3 suite, the company says. But it costs about 20 percent of the suite's price.
That full-scale suite is designed to let developers trace transactions across geographically distributed systems with large, scalable virtualized server clusters for business-critical applications that require 24x7 uptime (for more on that release,
click here).
Like the larger version, the Standard Edition comes with Visual Studio, Visual Studio Team System Test Edition and Eclipse plug-ins. It diagnoses and isolates typical Web application issues, notably database performance problems and chattiness. The software also documents issues for developers including SQL statements and bind values, and various other transaction characteristics. The software takes every transaction and displays the slowest running ones or those that are broken. When the developer clicks on a transaction, he can view the whole path with all the context. If a developer sees hundreds of extra calls to a database, he can click on it and automatically open up the source code in Visual Studio.
| Test Center Standard Edition |
| dynaTrace Software |
| Price: $6,000 per developer license |
| dynaTrace.com |
| 781-674-4000 |
Although not as well known as some of its rivals, dynaTrace says it has made inroads in the U.S. market over the past year with customers such as Bank of America, Fidelity Investments, LinkedIn and Macy's. It has 100 customers but has seen rapid growth in recent quarters, the company says. But dynaTrace, which is backed by Bain Capital and Bay Partners, is a much smaller player than market leader CA, whose Wily Technology is used by more than 1,000 customers.
Driving ODBC Harder
Looking to give a boost to applications that rely on Microsoft's Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) standard, DataDirect Technologies has updated its drivers.
The new DataDirect Connect for ODBC version 6.0 increases the speed at which data is loaded into an application or into a database, says Rob Steward, the company's vice president of R&D. It allows for exporting of data from one database into another and performs bulk transfers without having to use Microsoft's batch processing utility.
Existing batch processes will run faster without requiring changes to application code, he adds. Version 6.0 adds application failover: "The features will allow developers to better tune their applications," he explains.
In addition to Microsoft's SQL Server, DataDirect's ODBC drivers provide connectivity to databases from Oracle Corp., IBM Corp. (DB2 and Informix) and Sybase Inc., among others. With the new release, the company has added connectivity to PostgresSQL and Greenblum.
| Connect for ODBC 6.0 |
| DataDirect Technologies |
| Price:$4,000 per single core |
| datadirect.com |
| 800-876-3101 |
DataDirect, a Bedford, Mass.-based subsidiary of Progress Software Corp., is among a handful of companies that provide ODBC drivers. Most leading database vendors offer their own ODBC drivers and there are a number of less-expensive, open source alternatives as well. DataDirect says its drivers are aimed at ISVs and large enterprises.
About the Author
Written/compiled by the editors of Visual Studio Magazine.