All;

If you are new to the Archimedes project, welcome. If you have been
a regular member, happy holidays!

The latest version of the MetaRepos (a Versata 5.5.3.x application)
now supports WebSphere 5.0. This will allow Archimedes the ability
to persist all the XML metadata from your Versata repository to a
local database. This is done using a very strong XML to Java to
Versata persistence engine built into Archimedes.

There are also has a couple of new features. First, I have added a
common data dictionary feature to allow you to map source and target
table/columns between different repositories (used to do federations
and data movements). I have also worked on the differencing engine -
there is a new Java application to demonstrate this feature. When you
persist your metadata, you give it a version number. Later, after
making changes to Versata, you can persist your new repository and
then run the difference engine to identify what has been
added/removed/modified.

There are several HTML sample applications that will let you search
and navigate your metadata. For example, search for all the
attributes that have a VARCHAR datatype, or all attributes that have
sums or counts. It is a great way to cross check your spelling of
foreign keys and make sure your datatypes match.

Finally, I would like to encourage everyone building or supporting
Versata (and non-Versata) applications to add plans to include the
Archimedes Data Testing Workbench - powered by Euclid from Integrity
Logic. This is the first of a series of tools designed to help with
project quality by testing the logical integrity of your application
data. Euclid will run tests directly against any JDBC database and
measure the accuracy of the data. This is an invaluable tool for
DBA's, developers, data migrations, data movements, and QA
specialists. You can't fix it if you can't measure it! Download a
30-day trial from http://www.logical-integrity.com

Your feedback is always welcome and your ideas are what make the
Archimedes Open Source project work.

Tyler