Vinculum enables companies to get ahead in today’s competitive business environment by allocating and deploying their IT assets strategically, applying skilled staff and utilizing effective management to support their infrastructure. Vinculum provides the expertise to develop, analyze, and synthesize comprehensive Information System Models.
Client/Server Architecture
Vinculum designs an application architecture that handles data storage and retrieval on the server side and data manipulation and presentation on the client side. A client server architecture can be two tiered, or three tiered.
Two tier Architecture
The graphical user interface resides on the client's desktop and the database management services are provided by a powerful server. The application logic is buried in the user interface or within the server using stored procedures and triggers. Two tiered applications include email, simple Web pages, data entry applications etc. It's a good solution when the work group is small. This architecture is called fat client due to a large chunk of application running on the client side. These systems are unable to adapt to growing user activity, data volume and changes in business logic. Popular vendor proprietary software implementations include Sybase/PowerBuilder and MSSQLServer/Visual Basic.
Three tier Architecture
The three tier design emerged to overcome the limitations of the two tier architecture. In the three tier architecture, a middle tier was added to isolate data processing and maximize object reuse. The client delivers its request to the middle layer and disengages, while the middle layer accesses the server and then returns the service. The 3-tier architecture improves performance when the user group is large and provides flexibility in partitioning application information into modules.
Middle Ware
The middle tier can be implemented in a variety of ways depending on the application requirements. Examples of a middle tier include Application Servers, Transaction Processing Monitors(TPM), Message Oriented middleware(MOM), Object Request Brokers(ORB) and Distributed/Collaborative Servers.CORBA from Object Management Group(OMG) and DCOM from Microsoft are the popular object oriented technologies used. Remote Method Invocation is another Object Oriented approach, but it is an all Java solution where the client and the server have to be Java objects. MOM focuses on intelligent messages and provides good solutions for wireless infrastructures.
Application Servers
The Application Server is a shared server which hosts business logic, computations and the data retrieval engine. They take care of scalability, load balancing, security, software installation and support issues.The Application Server can be part of a Transaction Monitoring System(TPM). The TPM accepts the transaction, queues it, and manages it to completion, freeing the client. This technology can provide multiple database updates in a single transaction, connectivity to multiple data sources and robust security. The popular Application Servers include Web Logic, Web Sapphire, Silver Stream, Web Sphere etc. The popular Transaction Monitors include Tuxedo and Open UTM.
CORBA/DCOM
Three tier with an Object Request Broker(ORB) architecture provides inter-operability across languages and platforms, enhances maintainability and adaptability of the system. ORBs let objects transparently make requests to and receive responses from other objects located locally or remotely. We can invoke methods on server objects using high level languages such as Java, and C++.ORB separates interface from implementation by specifying an Interface Definition Language(IDL) which provides language neutral data types. Popular CORBA implementations include VisiBroker from Visigenic, Orbix from Iona and Tuxedo from BEA. DCOM provides the best solution for distributed applications running on Microsoft based operating systems.
GUI
Starting from the user's conceptual model, views are designed for each visible object, followed by the composition of the entire interface. In general the users model has a system model of the objects, task model, and metaphors which help users apply knowledge about the structure of things they already know to the system and task models. The user interface design is based on a model view controller paradigm. The model encompasses the state data, the view refers to how you see it on the screen and the controller dictates how the component interacts with events. The screen design issues include user friendliness, intuitive navigation, data validation and fail over management.Integrated Development Environment(IDE) softwares provide drag and drop graphical interface builders and component interaction with automatic code generation. Popular IDEs include Visual Age, Visual Café for Java and Microsoft Visual C++.
Database Arena
VINCULUM DATABASE PERSPECTIVE
What is the role of Vinculum Professional in the Database Arena?This is a question which needs a prognosis and an analysis from a standpoint that will trickle down from a business process, conversion of data into information and through application development. This will require using different areas of information systems like the Casetool arena, GUI tool arena, DBA arena, Datawarehouse arena, Datamining arena and Web server arena.
Let us see how Vinculum professionals create "value" in a company through the database arena.
A business process is an activity, or collection of activities, in which a business engages in order to create or add some kind of value for its customers. A typical business might have between five and nine major business processes, and these can operate across corporate departments or divisions. Anything that your business does can be a business process. Take the case of a Music store: "buy a CD", "make a payment", "get a receipt" and so on. This means that everything your business does can be seen in terms of business processes, from selling CD's to releasing a major new product line.
Each business process generates massive amounts of data. The conversion of data into information is the bedrock on which every corporate organization revolves it's business model. Vinculum Consultants make this happen.
The figure below shows the flow of data through the operating system into the Oracle server and how the database language of SQL/PL/SQL converts them with development tools into information read through the robust applications.
VINCULUM APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT in the database arenas permeates into diverse areas:
CASETOOL ARENA
This arena supports the modeling of complex systems with business process reengineering (BPR), analysis, and design programmers.. Entity relationship modeling involves identifying the things of importance in an organization (entities), the properties of those things (attributes) and how they are related to one another (relationships). The resulting information model is independent of any data storage or access method. Large entity relationship diagrams can be drawn for entire complex systems, or smaller diagrams drawn for subsets of systems. One entity can appear in numerous diagrams, enabling many detailed subset models to be defined.Dataflow diagramming involves the creation of diagrams to show how data flows through your organization. Dataflow diagrams are drawn to represent data dependencies, system components or even the context of a project. Each dataflow diagram represents a single business function for an application system. This function may be a mission statement for an entire organization, or a small series of activities for an isolated part of the organization's business.
Vinculum database design engineers create and maintain database designs based upon entity models recorded in your Repository. They create tables to record instances of each entity, columns to store the attributes, and constraints to implement the relationships between entities and also create constraints to enforce any unique identifiers that you have defined, and indexes to support the foreign keys. Like the entity model, the database design that it generates is stored in the Repository. This model can subsequently be used by other utilities to generate the SQL statements required to create the database itself.
Vinculum programmers are experts in creating a common repository with flexible modeling and methodology support.
GUI TOOL ARENA
Vinculum GUI programmers empower organizations with the ability to rapidly and productively build sophisticated systems, which scale from workgroup to enterprise. The unparalleled support for server functionality such as array fetch, database cursors, bind variables, savepoints and sequences enhances the productivity. The Vinculum analysts uses the GUI interfaces to implement powerful combinations of object navigators, tabbed dialogs and property palettes to make the creation of GUI applications extremely productive.The figure below shows the diverse levels of arenas in which Vinculum professionals have well honed skills.
DATABASE ADMINISTRATION ARENA
Vinculum DATABASE ADMINISTRATORS are experts in oracle Server Architecture, Oracle Database, Database structures, and Oracle instance. They are adept in Configuration of Multithreaded Servers, , Symmetric replication, specifying Dispatcher Service, Utilizing Shared Servers, monitoring the activity in Multithreaded Server Queues and Monitor circuits. Consultants control database system resources by defining profiles, profiling usage and enable auditing , specify privilege auditing, monitoring ,and managing the audit trail and giving appropriate audit recommendations.
Manage database storage, storage parameters, block space utilization parameters, control extent allocation, specify storage parameters, and control space usage. Ensure data integrity by providing appropriate constraints.
DATAWAREHOUSE ADMINISTRATION ARENA
Vinculum DATAWAREHOUSE ADMINISTRATORS are experts in data modeling, data extraction, data quality, data distribution and data access. Their experience in OLAP servers especially in Relational OLAP, multidimensional proprietary databases, datelining servers are exemplary. These servers maintain data integrity, reporting and system management. Enterprise data warehouses, datamarts andOperational data store their configurations. Functionality and positioning are their forte. They also extract transform and transport (ETT) data and are expert in ETT tools. They recover the datawarehouse and also tune the performance of the data warehouse.
The warehouse server sits in the center of a datawarehouse called the enterprisewide model. All data is loaded into the central warehouse database. End users can access data through this centralized data store. The advantage is that data is stored in one place and reliability of data is increased.
WEBSERVER ARENA
The Oracle WebServer is an HTTP server tightly integrated with the Oracle database. Business data stored on the Oracle database is formatted into Web (HTML) documents within the WebServer and then transmitted to Web Clients, on request.Web users request HTML information by entering an appropriate Uniform Resource Locator (URL). This URL specifies the target Oracle WebServer machine or site, the WebServer database connection descriptor (Oracle database logon information), and the PL/SQL routine to run on that database user.
The PL/SQL routine specified within the URL fetches the data from the Oracle database and then makes use of other PL/SQL routines provided within the Oracle WebServer Developer's Toolkit to format the data within the required HTML syntax. The formatted data is then routed to the user originating the request, via the Web Request Broker.
Vinculum expertise has deeply embedded the seeds of quality and fruits of value that allow clients to scale from 5 to 5000 users. From gigabytes to terabytes and from decision support to complex OLTP applications, Vinculum will continue to deliver the solution that will provide the system excellence on which you can continue vast corporate growth.
