Bellevue, Washington-based Attachmate Corp has launched Select!, a family of database access tools acquired when it bought Datasix SA of Saint Gely du Fesc, France, (CI No 2,469). Datasix has been selling Select! for six years in Europe and now Attachmate has added IBM Corp’s Distributed Relational Database Architecture to it, getting rid of the need for database gateways, and has also added a Windows style interface, and a database-to-database replication engine. Attachmate, through its spate of acquisitions, has grown to become the seventh largest software development company in terms of annual turnover, which is running at ú390m. Its history is that of a provider of communications software from the desktop to the mainframe, but now it is expanding to become an what it likes to term a information access company. With Select!, Attachmate is offering tools that it says enable desktop users to access information regardless of where it is held in a corporation.
No code gateway
There is DBQuery, Select! Professional and Select! Supervisor, which addresses security concerns about enabling end-users to access information held anywhere with in a corporation. Select! Supervisor enables systems administrators to configure data so that users’ access can be limited. Select! Professional provides native drivers for Distributed Relational Database Architecture, the application programming interface that enables the tool to talk directly to DB2 using IBM’s Advanced Program-to-Program Communications; and Open Database Connectivity. Attachmate says this cuts down costs as there is no code gateway to maintain and also enables Select! to import data into applications on the desktop. Select!-generated queries can be turned into objects that can be embedded into other applications using Microsoft Corp’s Object Linking & Embedding. Attachmate has also embedded cut-down versions of Select! into some of its emulation clients. The products are available now. No prices.
