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fcSDK Cache files: sometimes more trouble then they're worth

July 30, 2007 One of the features of the fcSDK is its ability to cache frequently-used, rarely-changed data, such as the schema meta-data (ADP tables), lists (Application Lists, Status codes, User-defined lists), geography data (states, countries, time_zones, currencies), configuration items, and strings. When the fcSDK starts up, it reads all of this data from the database and saves it into memory. In addition, it writes out the data to cache files. The next time the fcSDK starts up, if there are cache files present, it loads the data from the cache files, as opposed to having to go to the database. This improves the performance of the loading of the cache data, as reading from a local file is quicker than loading from a remote database. However, these cache files can often cause trouble. If a piece of cache data is changed in…

Vista and Managed Performance Counters

June 27, 2007 While doing some work on RuleManager I was having trouble running integration tests on my development system which is 64bit "Business" Vista. I would invoke the test using TestDriven.Net and sometimes the test would run fine and sometimes it would just sit and spin. Additionally through out the day I was getting this dialog. My first attempts to Google it didn't return anything obvious so I kept going. Later during the day my entire network stack shutdown. I was worried that my Vista install was destabilizing and did a reboot and made sure all my drivers were up-to-date. Trying to finish up my task today I once again got the WMI Performance Reverse Adapter stopped message so googled it once again and this time came upon this post which pointed me at Managed Performance Counters as a possible culprit. The product I am…

We're a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner again

April 12, 2007 We retained our Microsoft Gold Certified Partner status for another year by passing the competancy requirements for: ISV/Software Solutions Custom development Solutions Data Management Solutions As part of our certification process, Dovetail Rulemanager was tested and Certified for Windows Server.

Hello

January 30, 2007 Just wanted to introduce myself. I am Kevin Miller long time blog reader first time blogger. I have been with Dovetail Software for almost exactly 3 years now and enjoyed helping out on Dovetail SDK, RuleManager and SchemaEditor. This will likely be a blog filled with technical content about the products we make and the technologies we dabble into. I will also likely serialize some support information that will be valuable to our customers. I will warn you my sentence structure will leave you guessing but hopefully the content will make amends for my grammatical transgressions.

Yank Notifications via Email

January 16, 2007 Clarify's Business Rules + RuleManager is a pretty robust and generic event processing system. Admins/BAs configure rules for who to notify and when, and each user can even decide how they want to be notified (email, pager, within the app itself (the Integrated Notifier), etc.). Most of us here at Dovetail use email as our notification preference. I don't believe any of us the integrated Notifier.There has always been one desired business rule that I couldn't make work with the existing Clarify infrastructure - yank notifications by email.Note: in later versions of Clarify, Yank has been renamed to Retrieve. After many years of snickering over the term Yank, it's just now a natural part of my vocabulary. But I digress...For example, if someone yanks a case from me, I would like to get notified that it happened. And I want the notification to…

Let the system tell you where potential performance bottlenecks exist

January 15, 2007 A common cause of performance issues in database backed systems is poorly defined SQL, either a SQL operation that takes a long time to execute, or a SQL query that returns a large number of rows.Operations that take a long to execute can typically be corrected by database tuning, such as adding indexing, or changing the application logic so that the database can better optimize the operation.Queries that return a large amonunt of data can stress the application server & network. All that data needs to be transferred from the database to the application server, and in web applications, that data needs to then get transferred from the web server to the web client (browser).Typically, it's not that difficult to tune the database or tweak code once these situations are identified. However, it's not always easy to figure out where…

Email Integration with Clarify

January 12, 2007 Over the last 12 years of working with Clarify, email integration always seems to be a key topic of conversation, and I get many questions about email integration capabilities. So hopefully this post will answer most of these questions. I'm sure there will be details I've missed (especially on some of Clarify's later version capabilities), so please leave a comment. Outgoing Email Outgoing email is typically initiated via a Log Email action (for example, from a case) within the Client. When a email is "sent", the client saves the email details to the database, and then also adds a new time_bomb. This time_bomb tells RuleManager that it needs to send out this email. The Clarify client does not connect to a mail server or service, so it can not send the email, so RuleManager does it. On Windows, RuleManager connects…

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