Archive for the ‘SimpleDB Management Tools’ Category

Improved support options for customers

Tagged as LightSpeed, MegaPack, Products, SimpleDB Management Tools, VS File Explorer, WPF Diagramming, WPF Elements, WPF Property Grid

Hand in hand with our recent volume discounts and LightSpeed 3.0 release we have started to put in place an improved support capability for customers who need priority support options or may occasionally want to escalate support beyond what we normally offer.

Tooting our own horn a little, we have had very positive feedback from many customers who have said our support is fantastic. We hope this addition helps us maintain end user happiness as we continue to grow and our support load scales up.

What is priority support?

Priority support is the option to ensure that your request is dealt with promptly, and is reviewed before and prioritised over normal forum posts. It is also useful for folks who wish to not use the forum which is quite open and may not be viable for talking about sensitive parts of a software system.

Can I use it for feature requests?

No, we still urge that feature requests be posted in the forums so that others may discuss them (and because we don’t think it’s fair to charge you for suggesting cool features!). Features are still only added to products at our discretion.

How much does priority support cost?

We have priced support at $199 USD per priority support issue OR at $499 for a 5 pack of support issues, a 50% saving. You will be able to see if you have support tickets in your store account page. We have been issuing 1 priority support ticket per customer to LightSpeed 3.0 customers and upgrading Enterprise Edition customers. For other products, we’re in the process of migrating Enterprise customers to have a priority ticket added to their account.

The pricing is designed to be very cost effective and is inexpensive compared to the support options offered for other software (for example, one commercial NHibernate support vendor quotes 600 Euro, approximately $870 USD, per incident for ad hoc support).

You can purchase Priority support tickets in our online store.

Do I need it? Should I put all my requests through priority support?

If you need a guaranteed response, or a quick response is crucial to you, or you don’t want to discuss your issue on the public forum, then you should put a request through priority support. The forum will still get monitored actively by Mindscape staff and questions will be answered, but there are no guarantees around response times (our response times have usually been pretty good, but never guaranteed!).

Priority support is for those times when you need additional help and you don’t want to rely on the forums. You are welcome to simply buy a support ticket as you need them for $199 USD however it may be wiser to simply purchase a 5 pack in order to save 50%.

If I’ve missed any questions you have then please post a comment – I’m happy to answer them :-)

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Posted by John-Daniel Trask on 15 December 2009

Multi-value attributes in SimpleDB Management Tools

Tagged as SimpleDB Management Tools

SimpleDB, unlike a relational database, allows you to store multiple values against a single attribute. For example, in a Books domain, the Author attribute might contain multiple values to represent a book with several authors.

We’ve now added support for this feature to SimpleDB Management Tools. The latest version sports a new Edit Values button which pops up a dialog where you can add and delete values as well as editing them. In the grid, multi-valued attributes are shown with their number of values, and you can click the cell to edit the values without needing to go to the Edit Values toolbar button.

Of course, if you only want a single value against an attribute, you can still edit it normally in the SimpleDB Management Tools grid. You only need the dialog if you’re managing multiple values.

Want to give it a try? Download the free trial edition, or if you already own SimpleDB Management Tools then get the upgrade from the store.

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Posted by Ivan Towlson on 19 July 2009

M/DB support update

Tagged as LightSpeed, SimpleDB Management Tools

Earlier this week we announced LightSpeed and SimpleDB Management Tools support for M/Gateway’s M/DB, a free database which is “plug-compatible” with Amazon’s SimpleDB. At the time I noted a couple of issues and limitations. I’m glad to say that M/Gateway have very quickly addressed these, with a new build (build 26) available for download now. With this new build:

• You no longer need to use SignatureVersion=1 when accessing M/DB; the default signature version and method will just work.
• The issues around single quotes in queries, and around sorting and starts-with, are resolved.

At the moment there appears to be an outstanding issue with paging, but because M/DB doesn’t impose a limit on the size of responses the way Amazon does, you can work around this by paging on the client. M/Gateway are looking into this to see if it can be resolved.

We’d like to thank Rob Tweed of M/Gateway for his help and his rapid response on this. If you’re using SimpleDB and you want a fast, convenient test-bed, do check out M/DB.

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Posted by Ivan Towlson on 21 May 2009

M/DB support in SimpleDB Management Tools and LightSpeed

Tagged as LightSpeed, SimpleDB Management Tools

Amazon’s SimpleDB cloud database is cool, but it’s not the ideal platform for development and testing — it can be a pain having to go all the way to Amazon for each test, it’s not very convenient to set up isolated instances for each developer, and the “eventual consistency” behaviour of SimpleDB makes verifying updates unreliable.

Fortunately, MGateway Developments have a free, “plug-compatible” alternative called M/DB, which not only allows you to have local test versions of SimpleDB but can also be used in production to break through some of SimpleDB’s limitations. It’s provided as a handy virtual appliance, which makes it a snap to set up locally.

We’ve now updated LightSpeed and SimpleDB Management Tools to support M/DB. In SimpleDB Management Tools, you now can supply a URL to a M/DB instance. You can then work with that instance in Server Explorer and the Query window just as you now do with the Amazon service. You can set up connections to multiple M/DB instances and have them alongside your connection to Amazon itself.

In LightSpeed, we’ve added elements to the connection string to allow you to override the default Amazon URL and point to a M/DB instance instead. Simply add the following element to your connection string:

Url=http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/mdb/request.mgwsi

and you’ll be good to go.

If you want to try out LightSpeed against M/DB, grab the latest nightly from here or from the store.

To get the updated version of SimpleDB Management Tools, go here for the free edition or to the store for the unlimited edition.

UPDATE: In the M/DB “virtual appliance” (build 21) there were some compatibility issues noted in an earlier version of this post. These issues are now fixed but you will need to download and install M/DB build 26 or above to make it work seamlessly with LightSpeed and SimpleDB Management Tools.

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Posted by Ivan Towlson on 17 May 2009

User feedback – what’s yours?

Tagged as LightSpeed, Products, SimpleDB Management Tools, VS File Explorer, WPF Diagramming, WPF Elements, WPF Property Grid

Omar, a recent new Mindscape customer and LightSpeed user has written a fantastic blog post about his impressions of Mindscape LightSpeed. We always appreciate when our users blog about their experiences with our products – it’s the best form of marketing that a small business can get when selling developer tools. If you write about LightSpeed do let us know, we all get a buzz out of seeing people enjoying our products.

A snippet from Omar’s LightSpeed Review reads:

LightSpeed has changed my mind on how good ORMs can be. The guys at Mindscape are so helpful and work with customers on personal basis and will always take the time to listen to your problems. The support is just great. While I am not saying that LightSpeed is the answer to every problem out there it is definitely a huge leap in the right direction. Keep doing what you do best Mindscape and keep the new functionalities and goodness flowing. If you got me to become an ORM user then I will go as far as saying “NHibernate, you loose”.

You can read the post in its entirety here.

We have always had some testimonials for LightSpeed on the site but have been slow to update that page or to post testimonials for other products (we do get them, we’re just quite busy! :-). So, in an attempt to remedy this situation and to make a bit more noise about the successes that our customers are having with our products we’re looking to publish case studies for users who wish to take part. This can be for any product that we have built – not just LightSpeed.

This is an opportunity to provide us with feedback on what we’re doing right and areas that we can improve. It’s also a good chance to publicize the products you’re building on Mindscape tools or to highlight your business to others looking at using Mindscape tools.

If you’re interested, get in touch by emailing jd@mindscape.co.nz and I’ll send you out a questionnaire that will act as the basis of a case study.

Thanks in advance!

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Posted by John-Daniel Trask on 10 March 2009