Jade Software Corp. has collaborated with Microsoft to provide a Relational Population Service (RPS) to SQL Server in the recently enhanced version 6.1 of the JADE development and runtime platform.

Released last month, JADE 6.1 incorporates a number of major features, including RPS. RPS provides mapping tools and automatic data replication to relational databases for reporting, business intelligence (BI) and data warehousing purposes. Microsoft SQL Server is the first relational database supported by RPS, including SQL Server 2005.

Jade's RPS was developed with design and implementation advice from Microsoft. It's advice that Microsoft was happy to provide, as Sean McBreen, director of developer and platform strategy group, explains, "Microsoft welcomes the development of Jade's Relational Population Service capability in JADE 6.1."

With this, JADE technology will build on its track-record of delivering large, critical, online systems and RPS to increase easy data replication between JADE and SQL Server 2005, especially for BI and data warehousing purposes.

McBreen said the extract, transform and load (ETL) capabilities in SQL Server 2005, as well as new reporting services, make SQL Server 2005 and JADE 6.1 RPS highly complementary software that customers would gain significant value from."

United Kingdom-based customers, Skipton Building Society and Homeloan Management Ltd (HML), took advantage of the JADE 6.1 Beta Program to gear up for RPS. As well as familiarizing themselves with the mapping tools and deployment, they've been testing replication performance, with excellent results.

David Slack, technical project manager for Skipton Building Society, explained that in addition to its own core JADE systems, Skipton manages a number of large, critical, online JADE systems for other organizations.

"Several of these systems feed data into a large SQL Server data warehouse that is used to provide BI information to customers," Slack said. "RPS will make it easy for us to automatically replicate data from the online JADE systems to SQL Server in near real-time. With the high performance of RPS we're expecting significant reductions in CPU utilization and batch processing time."

Debbie Richardson, HML IT director, agreed.

"We've used SQL Server and Microsoft's BI tools for our data warehousing needs for over four years," Richardson said. "RPS in JADE 6.1 delivers an automated and seamless mechanism to transfer data from our core online JADE systems to SQL Server. This will provide us with a cost-effective approach to significantly improve the availability, performance, scalability and security of the first stage of our ETL process."

According to Dean Cooper, JADE Program Manager, the choice of SQL Server in JADE 6.1 was driven by customer demand. Jade expects to support other relational databases in future releases of RPS.

JADE 6.1 for Windows, Red Hat Linux and SUSE Linux on Intel-compatible hardware is available for free download at www.jadeworld.com/ jade.

Production systems for commercial use must be licensed separately. In preferred relationships, support for other IBM hardware platforms is available on request.

Technical support is available through a range of support options, designed to give customers a choice in the level of technical service they require.