Data management software maker Embarcadero Technologies Inc. this week will roll out a new tool for data extraction, transaction and loading, the beginning of what the company said will be a busy product road map for this year.
DT/Studio, which is software for Oracle Corp., IBM, Microsoft Corp. and Sybase Inc. relational databases, includes an API and design and monitoring consoles and is built in Java, said Embarcadero Chairman and CEO Stephen Wong. Version 1.1 is available now and costs $35,000. But DT/Studio represents bigger plans for Embarcadero, of San Francisco.
“This is a critical new offering for us,” said Wong, who also founded the company. “What [customers] want us to do is basically abstract database administration so its heterogeneous.”
With a major update coming this summer, the product will get multitasking capabilities, a data stream debugging tool and support for nonrelational databases, he said.
Beyond that, Embarcadero plans to build extension products for integrating scheduling with database administration and to transition desktop-based products into server-based ones. That technology is about a year away. Data quality monitoring is also in the works, Wong said.
Looking even further ahead, database administration could take on a whole new face when 64-bit processors take off, as their extra addressable memory clears existing data bottlenecks, he said.
At the Lifetime cable television station, co-owned by Hearst-Argyle Television Inc. and The Walt Disney Co., Database Administrator Vipul Kothari plans to test DT/Studio. “Im not too sure about the Java part, but wed obviously like to take a look at that,” said Kothari in New York.
Lifetimes experience running several Oracle8i databases with Embarcaderos software has been mostly positive, but the Performance Center application is “pretty unstable,” he said. Kothari is more encouraged about the server-based plans. “A couple of guys came here for a demo. That sounded very useful,” he said.
Analyst Jacqueline Sweeney-Coolidge, of Hurwitz Group Inc., in Framingham, Mass., also has mixed feelings on Embarcaderos plans. “I believe that the market is definitely continuing to evolve, but I think they have their work cut out for them,” she said, adding that Embarcadero advertises its low pricing while most enterprises worry more about performance.
