PH Enhancements Rant - WAS: Quiz Hang When Using Image in Axiant

[Deskin, Bob]

Whatever I say here, you'll ask for more or say that it's not enough or
it's not the right thing.

But just to set the record straight, conformance is very important and
not bug fixing. Over the years we've added databases and dropped others.
We've added database versions to keep up to date. We added Eloquence
support for migrating HPe3000 customers and it turns out that the work
we did is transparent enough so that other IMAGE emulators can be used
without any additional work on our part. If you think that's not an
important enhancement, just ask the customers who make use of it.

We now have full-blown QUICK on Windows as of 8.4. That makes another
option available to all PowerHouse customers, not just iX  migrators.

If the last New Features book you saw was 8.39, what happened to the 8.4
New Features book included with 8.43D. The book was almost 100 pages
long.

In 8.4xD1, nominally a maintenance on-request release, we added Oracle
10g support among other new versions. We also added DataDirect ODBC
support to SQL Server, something requested by many customers. There are
a number of tweaks to relational support such as whether strict SQL 92
is required or not. There were also a number of PH Web new features.

There will be more new features and conformance improvements in the next
release, sometime next year (2006). And we've got other things up our
sleeves that I can't tell you about yet.

If there's something you want, submit an enhancement request. If you
want to start a list-based enhancement poll, please do. I won't promise
that we'll do what the list tells us, but we'll certainly take it into
consideration. If the listers want to put together a list of
enhancements and then vote on them, I'd love to see it.

Bob Deskin              
Senior Product Manager, Application Development Tools, Cognos Inc.
bob.deskin at cognos.com (613) 738-1338 ext 7268
3755 Riverside Drive P.O. Box 9707 Stn. T, Ottawa ON K1G 4K9 CANADA

-----Original Message-----
From: powerh-l-bounces+bob.deskin=cognos.com at lists.sowder.com
[mailto:powerh-l-bounces+bob.deskin=cognos.com at lists.sowder.com] On
Behalf Of Darren Reely
Sent: September 2, 2005 5:16 PM
To: Joe Boyle; 'powerh-l at lists.sowder.com'
Subject: PH Enhancements Rant - WAS: Quiz Hang When Using Image in
Axiant


Flame on...

Joe Boyle wrote:
> ...perhaps you did'nt argue the case strongly enough when
> attempting to have a bug fix logged.

As was stated to me, it was NOT a bug. So if you want the FEATURE you 
need to send them an enhancement request. I don't remember if I argued 
for the enhancement. That was over 6 years ago!

Cognos doesn't (the developers may) seem to have any drive to add new 
features to Powerhouse. They work on the background stuff (bugs and DB 
access stuff) they need to, but that often isn't obvious to a PH 
programmer. What was the last feature added to Powerhouse, the format 
number capability. Oh, wait, that was available for years on one 
platform, so they only ported it to the base code.

I've been using Powerhouse since 1991, and the only enhancements I 
recall are access to relational databases, the limited ability to use 
cursors, PHWEB, and a few new function calls.  Main maintenance items 
have been the common code base, the underlying common data access layer 
shared between products, and of course the common task of keeping the 
product usable with newer databases and OS's.

I think Bob and Conrad have both asked for requests. We as developers 
need to be more proactive. Perhaps part of the problem is the limited 
communication between developers doesn't generate enough discussion to 
push the product forward. We can't see beyond the edge of our 
development universe.

It would be nice to see the proposed list Cognos has, and items of 
interest directly from us developers. How does Cognos get feedback on 
what is already in their request list?

By the way, the last New Features document I have is for Powerhouse 
8.39. We're currently running 8.43d.

Flame off.

Darren
-- 
= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =
Mailing list: powerh-l at lists.sowder.com
Subscribe: "subscribe" in message body to
powerh-l-request at lists.sowder.com
Unsubscribe: "unsubscribe <password>" in message body to
powerh-l-request at lists.sowder.com
http://lists.sowder.com/mailman/listinfo/powerh-l
This list is closed, thus to post to the list you must be a subscriber. 
  
       This message may contain privileged and/or confidential information.  If you have received this e-mail in error or are not the intended recipient, you may not use, copy, disseminate or distribute it; do not open any attachments, delete it immediately from your system and notify the sender promptly by e-mail that you have done so.  Thank you.