I just wanted to acknowledge the tremendous increase in the amount of Blog activity that I have received over the past year. I think (and hope) that this is because many Sybase professionals out there have come to visit my site for latest information on the Sybase scene. Since I started my Blog in August of 2005 I have seen a steady increase in unique visits to my site. This whole Blog experience of course is Reed Shilt's fault. Reed is the development manager for PocketBuilder and started the whole thing off by opening his own Blog within PBDJ, then sending me an invitation to join him in this new venue. At that point in time, Blogging was a whole new experience for me and in fact, I had not even heard the term until I received Reed's email.

What do your applications do? They bring data flows in, send them out, store them somewhere or display them in various forms, and so on. There are many issues around data. Have you also found that a large part of your application's code manages or is driven by data? Aggregate, transform, classify, and compute... All of these actions suggest you adopt a more data-centric approach to software design and development.

Groundbreaking nuclear-geneticist Hermann Joseph Muller said, 'Life is a whole ceaseless change. There is no sign of physical limit yet.' Bearing that in mind, it occurred to me that I should begin to test the limits of PowerBuilder 8, and see if I could disprove Muller. It seemed to me the easiest way to go about this heady undertaking was to convert our EMS natural gas trading and accounting application. It was written in PB 6.5 with the PFC and Transact-SQL for the motors behind the screens.

I was having a nice, sane conversation with some of the folks at Sybase who are responsible for the www.sybase.com portal, until we started talking about all the different elements that went into making this e-business endeavor possible.

Business and e-business development is becoming more complex. New modeling techniques are starting to converge with traditional techniques to keep up with the new demands IT departments must meet.

Though PowerDesigner 7 was released a few months ago, not many people are aware that it's much more feature-rich than past versions. Sybase has been pushing hard to get the word out that PD7 is a great product, but it's getting only mediocre media coverage. We haven't even mentioned it yet in this magazine, so I'm going to focus on it now. First, a little history?