Sundial Services is pleased to pre-pre-announce General Availability of
ChimneySweep(R) for Paradox/BDE Release 6.0, February 14, 2006.

All non-time-limited orders received from now through the general release
date will be fulfilled using the current edition at once, AND will receive
a copy of Release 6.0 on or shortly-after the release date at no additional
charge.

Many more details are to follow on our web-site.

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ChimneySweep(R): F-A-A-ST table repair at a click of the mouse!
http://www.sundialservices.com/products/chimneysweep

I, like many, have found ChimneySweep to be a very good tool. I'm still
using version 3.0. Why should I upgrade? Thanks Paul.

pfweston (AT) yahoo (DOT) com wrote:
I do not wish to "advertise" in an Internet newsgroup, but I will try to
briefly answer.

If you haven't looked at our web-site lately, please do so now at
http://www.sundialservices.com/products/chimneysweep.

The original intention of the product, in the incarnation as you see it, is
to automate the table-repair process, basically as implemented by TUtil32,
and to apply it across multiple tables in an automated fashion. A lot has
happened, and continues to happen, since that time. These changes include:

* Very comprehensive, now properly language-aware, high speed validation.
(More than 100 times faster than Paradox Table Repair by actual tests.)

* Direct, high-speed rebuilding of index files (in Rel6, now properly
language-aware). Also in-place repair of many memo-file issues.

* Capture of structure and referential-integrity information within the
job, and the ability to apply that known-good information during repair.

* On-disk known-good backups.

* An automatic job scheduler.

* Validation of referential-integrity links: does the data really match?

* An organized way to manage and archive job-output, instead of constantly
rewriting one job-output file.

* The ability to automatically e-mail a designated party with job output.

* Forthcoming dBase support for tables as-implemented by BDE/Paradox.

The purpose of the product has broadened from 'a very sophisticated fire
truck' to a 'fire prevention and automatic monitoring' role. We want
to /prevent/ problems from occurring .. by scanning for them regularly; by
making backups of the information; by timely notifying technical-support
personnel without explicit customer action being necessary.

Release 5.1 has had many of these features, and during this time-window a
purchase of that version will receive 6.0 as well on the release-date.

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ChimneySweep(R): F-A-A-ST table repair at a click of the mouse!
http://www.sundialservices.com/products/chimneysweep

That's nice, but will it run as a service on our server?


"Sundial Services" <info (AT) sundialservices (DOT) com> wrote

Jean Friedberg wrote:
It does not, at this time, run as a /service/ .. because as far as I am
aware, the service-environment in Windows-NT does not support BDE. (If
this impression is mistaken, PLEASE let us know!) Rather, it runs as a
minimized system-tray icon on a logged-on session.

In fact, I'll do some research to see if running as a service /is/ possible,
or at least running the scheduler as a service.

You /can/ schedule ChimneySweep jobs through a "regular" task scheduler.

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ChimneySweep(R): F-A-A-ST table repair at a click of the mouse!
http://www.sundialservices.com/products/chimneysweep

Jean Friedberg wrote:
Let me explore this question a little bit on-line ...

A fundamental attribute of a "service" is that it is non-visual. To some
degree, ChimneySweep is non-visual also: it gives you an entertaining
window to look-at while a job is running, but basically it does its job
without interaction.

ChimneySweep needs to run in a BDE-capable environment and it has no
compelling reason to run as a highly-privileged user. This could be
accomplished by launching a session-environment from a service, effectively
"logging on" to run an instance of the CSWEEP32 process. The service could
then monitor the progress of the executable.

I would like to know more about exactly what this requirement /is/ ... can
we have a little threaded discussion on this? I'll also open up a thread
on our forum at: http://www.sundialservices.com/forum ...

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ChimneySweep(R): F-A-A-ST table repair at a click of the mouse!
http://www.sundialservices.com/products/chimneysweep

AFAIK, programs that are set up to run as services on a windows server will
run without a logon.

As things now stand, we run ChimneySweep nightly as a scheduled task from a
logged-on workstation. But with all the data sitting on the server, it
would be much cleaner just to run ChimneySweep directly on the server
without a logon.

Jean

Jean Friedberg wrote:
Services can initiate a log-on type session. Investigation is underway on
this end; inputs from anyone else in the group are welcome.

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ChimneySweep(R): F-A-A-ST table repair at a click of the mouse!
http://www.sundialservices.com/products/chimneysweep

That's outstanding. Thanks
Jean