DeltaXML Newsletter - August 2004

From the product development team this month comes yet another performance-boosting release, this time addressing storage of text (PCDATA). If you have documents with many different element names, or with many small fragments of discrete data, this release could make a further significant improvement to the speeds you see.

We already have by far the greatest capacity and fastest speed of any available XML comparison engine, with an unmatched set of features. Because our customers are often using very large documents and have exacting requirements we are still keeping a focus on performance, despite this lead - our engine is often being used as a component in larger workflows, not just at endpoints for display and user interaction. This is what our customers are currently asking for, please let us know what's most important to you.

Any feedback on this newsletter or on our products are welcome as ever. Please tell us if you have any suggestions or recommendations for improvement.
Evaluation downloads of the DeltaXML Core API, together with full documentation and online demos, are available at our website: www.deltaxml.com

- The DeltaXML Team.

Contents

In this newsletter:

Recent DeltaXML Customers
DeltaXML Sponsors XML Open and Vignette Conferences
Technical Corner: Release 2.8.2
Diary Dates

Customer Focus: Recent DeltaXML Customers

Recent customers include:

AICPA (USA) (visit) - "Upholding the Profession", the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants and its predecessors have been serving the accounting profession since 1887.

DeltaXML is being used for management of library updates.
Visit our "Customers" page to learn more about the companies who depend upon DeltaXML.
[Read more...]

DeltaXML Sponsors XML Open and Vignette Conferences

We are sponsoring the new XML Open conference, held this year in Cambridge, UK in September. Open source developments are now crucial for the development of the industry, we're very happy to support this conference which is trying to bring together people from the various XML communities and open source initiatives. We'll be speaking there, as will Michael Kay of Saxon, Sean McGrath of Propylon (and the original 1998 XML Expert Group), Murata, Makoto of RELAX NG, Steven Noels of Apache Cocoon, Rick Jeliffe, Uche Ogbuji and many others. We'll be discussing the current state of play with XML forms technologies and their practical applications.

We're very glad to be in a position to contribute back to the community that has enabled us to make such progress. XML itself is an example of the excellent work that can come from standards bodies, and the enthusiastic reception by open source initiatives, particularly Apache, has helped propel it to its current success.

Vignette have been using DeltaXML for some time, integrating change control features into their top-end Vignette V7 product line. We're very pleased to have such a relationship and we'll also be sponsoring two Vignette Village events this year, in San Antonio, Texas in October and in London in November.

See Diary Dates below for more details.

Weblinks:
http://www.xmlopen.org/
www.vignette.com/vignettevillage

Technical Corner: Release 2.8.2

The fastest just got faster...

Regular readers will know we are rather keen on performance enhancements - and this is one we're particularly enthused about. Our algorithms have been very highly tuned for general-purpose use (with variable tree depth, child count, PCDATA size, attribute count etc.) -- and so we turned our attention to some storage optimizations. The effect has been very pleasing - in some cases we're seeing a twenty-fold speed increase, on speeds which are already the fastest in the industry.

This speed increase is particularly significant when processing very large files. Two years ago "very large" for XML generally meant a few megabytes, for some time we've been comfortably handling tens of megabytes - now, in our latest tests, we're processing 400Mb files in under 5 minutes.

This release is available as a free upgrade to customers of the 2.x series who chose our Support option. If you'd like to know more about the improvements, or the other (fully backwards compatible) changes in this latest release, please reply to this email.

Weblinks:
Comparing Large XML Datasets using DeltaXML: http://www.deltaxml.com/core/comparing-large-files.html

Diary Dates

XML Open Conference 2004: 21-23 September 2004, Cambridge, UK, http://www.xmlopen.org/
Vignette Village 2004: 25-27 October 2004, San Antonio, Texas, http://www.vignette.com/vignettevillage/us/overview/0,10397,2,00.html
XML 2004: 15-19 November 2004, Washington DC, USA, http://www.xmlconference.org/xmlusa/
Vignette Village 2004: 17-19 November 2004, London, UK, http://www.vignette.com/vignettevillage/uk/overview/1,10399,2,00.html

Weblinks:
DeltaXML news: http://www.deltaxml.com/news/

Please let us know whether this newsletter has been useful to you, we welcome any suggestions about information you'd like discussed in future editions. We'll be back next month with another edition.