This release of RODIN is the most significant release in the history of the product.  Major new functionality and ease of use characteristics have been incorporated to keep RODIN at the forefront of data warehousing technology to deliver major new benefits to our customers.

A significant milestone in this release is the first delivery of our new object oriented client technology developed in Java using VisualAge for Java.  This technology allows us to deliver highly stable and functional code, far better than was previously possible.  We are excited by this technology and the improvements it has already allowed us to make in our development processes and in RODIN itself.  In the future improved functionality, faster delivery and inherent quality will become extremely important development characteristics, and we know they will be equally if not more important to our customers.  That’s why we have made this investment.    

This release of RODIN also incorporates many recent enhancements delivered by IBM to the AS/400 hardware, OS/400 operating system and DB2/400 database.  Some of these new patented IBM technologies like Encoded Vector Indexes, which can deliver significant performance improvements in the data warehousing arena, have been delivered exclusively on the AS/400.  This puts the AS/400 and RODIN in the forefront of data warehousing technology.

Our alliance with the IBM Software Group and the IBM Visual Warehouse family of products has also allowed us to deliver major new functionality in the areas of heterogeneous database support, metadata integration and publication as well as cross platform processing support.  Integrating these advanced IBM products and technologies now allows us to deliver a fully integrated solution on the AS/400 in any mixed hardware and database environment. 

This alliance with IBM also announces our participation in the DB2 Metadata program, which offers our customers lower development and integration costs by being able to choose a variety of business intelligence tools which integrate the key metadata between them.

As with all RODIN development, the new functions in this release have been added as a result of requests and suggestions from our customer base, from industry and market research and from our many and varied business partner relationships, including and especially IBM.

However we won’t rest on our laurels but will continue to improve RODIN through a program of ongoing research and development and we look forward to announcing and delivering our next release.  Please feel free to contact us and make suggestions on how we can continue to improve RODIN to deliver more and better features and benefits to our valued customers.