CONNX Solutions announced the latest release of its industry-leading data access middleware product – CONNX 8.6. CONNX 8.6 incorporates a number of significant performance enhancements in addition to support for an additional data source – VSAM on OS/390 CICS.
“CONNX 8.6 is a significant release for CONNX Solutions both in terms of enhancements to our core technology in speed and usability as well as in extending our native database access to include IBM’s VSAM legacy database,” said Doug Wright, President and CEO of CONNX Solutions.
The addition of VSAM support to CONNX further enhances CONNX Solutions’ vision of integrating all enterprise data sources into a single virtual database. While many solutions such as XML claim to accomplish disparate database integration, most of these solutions tend to rely on multiple products or messaging to accomplish this task. CONNX differs from this in that the integration is real-time and through one product. Since legacy data sources such as VSAM continue to be mission-critical in many organisations, despite the rise of relational databases, the CONNX strategy focuses on providing access first to “orphan” data sources. It then also provides access to other relational sources across the enterprise – representing them as a single data source. VSAM data sources are highly prevalent in those organisations that utilised IBM mainframes as their primary systems.
“CONNX 8.6 opens up the CONNX technology to the IBM world of VSAM, providing a native high performance CICS driver. Additionally, our existing RMS customers will enjoy the significant FTL performance enhancements in 8.6 when accessing multi-million row files,” says Larry McGhaw, Director of Product Development.
CONNX 8.6 also marks the release of enhancements to CONNX’s proprietary FTL (Fast Tuning Logic) technology, which provides transparent optimisation of nonoptimal queries created through reporting tools or direct user entry. Specifically, CONNX 8.6 is expected to return results four times faster than previous versions on queries run against RMS files that do not utilise an index. Additionally, CONNX 8.6 also allows the representation of multiple RMS files as a single database object
All users of CONNX will benefit from enhancements to InfoNaut – the CONNX query including instant grouping of query results and several UI improvements. InfoNaut allows CONNX users to simply and quickly generate queries against CONNX data sources without the overhead and complexity necessitated by other query tools and can be deployed throughout their enterprise with minimal effort and training.
CONNX Solutions CEO Doug Wright described the need for InfoNaut as follows: “Many of the reporting tools on the market today provide fabulous functionality … for those that need and understand that functionality. For those that do not – mainly business and developer end users who just want to build a quick query that returns the information they need NOW — the overabundance of features in other reporting tools tends to slow down the process of accessing information.”
CONNX 8.6 also includes the product enhancements including support for Linked (parent/child) CONNX data dictionaries, integrated NT security support, catalog support, additional SQL Server support, a GUI-based CONNX View builder, InfoNaut and 30 new statistical aggregate functions.
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