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Dennick said hes pleased that Emic is adding JBoss to the stack. Thats because his company recently installed a third-party Java application that allows brokers to plan portfolios based on historical data. If your objective is to save $1 million by the age of 50, for example, the application will offer an allocation of assets to meet that goal, all in a Java-based format. "The current Apache cluster can handle it, so I can kill the server its currently on and gain extra availability by running it on a cluster," he said. "Its a win-win for me." Securities America runs Sybase Inc.s ASE (Adaptive System Enterprise) enterprise databases for other purposes, but Dennick said he preferred to cluster with Emic and MySQL/Apache because Sybase clusters would fail over instead of load-balancing. "Thats a downside," he said. "I have two big servers. Ones taking a load, the others waiting for the first one to fail. Data sits on one storage device. Node A is up and running, accessing the single-storage system. Node B accesses the same database if Node A fails. If data is corrupt [on Node A], you get into trouble." The only slight drawback hes experienced with the setup so far is that some vendors on which he relies for support—surprisingly large ones, Dennick said, although he declined to name them—still havent figured out the load-balancing paradigm. "I think whats common is a lot of companies … rely on support from vendors who say, You need to buy this equipment and do this to meet your objectives. Our company prides itself on hiring smart technology people and making the decisions and then looking for a vendor to sell them the equipment, as opposed to letting the vendor make the solution," which means that Securities America can tend to be a bit ahead of vendors with such things as clustering. Next up for Emics EAC 3.0, due out early next year, is support for multistatement transactions, according to Emic CEO Eero Teerikorpi. That support would allow for the bundling of multiple SQL statements that are then executed as one. An example of how this would be applicable is a person going to an ATM machine. Shed check her account balance, and then shed make a withdrawal or deposit. Thats a multistatement transaction that could have its steps combined into one command. The trick, Teerikorpi said, will be to have rollback capability, in case, for example, the customer changed her mind and canceled the transaction. Emic, based in San Jose, Calif., will ship EAC 2.5 in the fourth quarter. It is based on a per-server and per-CPU basis, starting at $1,495. Check out eWEEK.coms Database Center at http://database.eweek.com for the latest database news, reviews and analysis.

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