CIDC 2015 day two summary

CIDC day two started with SoftVelocity's Diego Borojovich demonstrating how to use Clarion's connectivity classes, specifically sending SMS messages. There really are a lot of communication-oriented classes somewhat buried in the libsrc directory, and also (in my opinion) made harder to use because the file names often don't give a good idea of what classes lie within. It was good to see how these classes could be used. 

Right after Diego's session we heard from the legendary Mike Gorman, secretary of the ANSI NCITS H2 Technical Committee on Database for a really really long time. He's been involved in writing the SQL standards we all rely on (although Mike will tell you there is no such thing as a SQL standard). Mike is a patient man - he's waited two years to give part two of his CIDC 2013 presentation, with a focus on data driven development, a rapid fire 

Shawn Mason was back at CIDC, covering data warehousing. That's a concept many of us apparently weren't familiar with, and while I've heard some of the terminology and had a vague idea, Shawn shed a lot of light and helped me understand that data warehousing isn't just something big companies need. 

After that SoftVelocity's Rob de Jager went through the process of configuring SQL server for full text searching, demonstrating the power of that feature using data from his Africa Biodiversity Management site.

Then it was time for the quarter mile trek to Cafe Osceola for the buffet lunch, then back in time to hear two third party presentations. Bill Rollins gave a personal introduction to and recommendation for several folks from ChargeItPro, who demonstrated Clarion code to interface with their payment processing system and had clear answers for every question that was asked. They were followed by Adrien and Camille from TSPlus who gave an equally impressive tour of their thin client solution. More on TSPlus in a bit.

Arbra Calvert led off the afternoon sessions with an overview of virtualization technologies. He'd intended to do the presentation from his Surface Pro 2 on which he's installed numerous VMs with operating systems from Windows to Linux to Mac. Unfortunately he had to do the presentation from an older notebook due to projection problems, but it was still pretty cool to see the Mac OS running on a Windows tablet. Arbra gave a good overview of the uses and benefits of virtual machines, and also showed how to create a new VM from scratch. 

Mike Hanson expanded on some of Diego's SMS presentation, showing how to use the Twilio web site's API with Clarion code. He stepped through the process of setting up an account, obtaining phone numbers, and sending texts. He also discussed many of the business-related opportunities in automated messaging. 

After a brief coffee break we returned to hear Rick Martin demonstrate file loaded trees, first with UltraTree and then with a bulk-loading approach that takes a bit more work up front but has greatly improved performance for large data sets. He detailed the SQL code used to retrieve the data and used the SQL profiler to show how using Buffer() can greatly improve performance. 

Arnold Young closed out the official sessions with a demonstration of how he's used TSPlus to provide mobile solutions for his customers. This was Arnold's first offical CIDC presentation and it was easily the most entertaining one of the entire conference. It's pretty difficult to explain just how it all happened. I may try. I may not. 

Andy Wilton of Noyantis fame had the closing third party presentation, which ended with a rousing game of British Bingo. The first round prize was a one TB portable drive, given to whoever got five in a row, and the second round prize was a two TB portable drive, given to whoever blacked out the card. But it had been a long day, and it took several false winning claims to persuade everyone that we weren't still playing five in a row. Eventually we got through the game and day two was in the books. 

Again, I'll have more detailed notes on some of the above presentations in the near future.