Claiming spiralling revenues from the developer and OEM products already under its belt, privately-held Open Data Base Connectivity developer PageAhead Software Corp, Seattle, Washington, is introducing SimbaExpress, effectively an end-user version of technology found in its Simba Engine and Simba C/S database access software. The company says SimbaExpress is designed to deliver easy access to standard SQL data from iAPX-86 personal computers or Macs. With it, data processing managers or database administrators can access multiple SQL databases concurrently, using a single Open Data Base Connectivity driver and one data communications driver. The package ships with Oracle and Sybase drivers. Third party or custom-built drivers can be installed on the server for access to other SQL sources. Client software installation and maintenance is controlled from the server. As SimbaExpress does not force all of the SQL commands through a universal SQL engine, PageAhead claims its software exposes more of the features of each supported database than other offerings. SimbaClient is the desktop Open Data Base Connectivity driver that communicates with SimbaManager – the server component. PageAhead claims the client occupies less than half of the memory required by most drivers and says one SimbaClient can manage multiple concurrent connections to any databases installed under SimbaManager. The SimbaExpress communications layer connects SimbaClients to SimbaManager over TCP/IP, SLIP, and IPX/SPX, replacing the need to install several data communications layers such as SQL*net, Ingres/net, or dblib. It also saves on network traffic. SimbaManager processes the SQL commands sent to it by SimbaClient, gathers the requested data, and passes the results back to SimbaClient. The company claims there is virtually no loss of database personality. SimbaManager will be up on HP-UX and AIX from June, with Santa Cruz, Solaris, and Windows NT versions planned for the second half. PageAhead’s other development software enables users to build connections to proprietary data. Simba Engine attaches to different types of databases, including flat files and enables Windows-based client applications to access the data. Simba C/S can be used to build drivers enabling computers to access data held in remote files. It supports any kind of data source and not simply relational information, so that SQL queries can be packaged to interrogate non-SQL data.
