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What's New?
DIG 2.0 is here!
This important release of Digital Information Gateway (DIG™) includes numerous new features, many of which we have already highlighted in previous issues. Some of the key new features are discussed below.
Scalability
DIG employs a scaleable, flexible architecture coupled with low administrative cost. DIG requires no customization to connect to most data sources and uses standards-compliant ODBC or native drivers.
Robust Communications
All communication in DIG is performed using XML and SOAP. SOAP allows DIG to communicate in the same fashion that a web browser communicates with a web server. This enables DIG to traverse firewalls via simple HTTP requests with no modifications to firewalls that already allow HTTP requests.
Open Architecture and Standards
DIG, like other Visual Analytics products, is built on open-architectures and standards, like XML, making it easy to adapt, extend or enhance to meet the specific needs of virtually any application. The DIG architecture is broken into four distinct parts - the Presentation Layer, the Business Layer, the Data Access Layer, and the Data Layer. Each layer has specific functions and purposes designed to take maximum advantage of power, speed and flexibility.
Clustering
Clustering is defined as the ability to cluster multiple physical servers to operate in parallel. This allows the application to grow/scale in conjunction with greater numbers of users by simply adding servers as necessary. In contrast, applications bound to a single server cannot scale past the number of users that a single server can support.
Statelessness
Linear scalability can be looked at as the application response time based on a number of users reaching specific thresholds and plateaus (i.e., the application responds in 1 second with 500 users - 2 seconds with 1000 users, 4 seconds with 2000 users, and so on...) based on a specific hardware environment.
Although true linear scalability is not entirely possible, near linear scalability has been proven time and again with stateless architectures. Stateless architectures do not require copying/synchronization of information between multiple application servers. Rather, persistent state (like tracking currently authenticated users) is looked up in a common location, like a back-end database. This enables the multi-server cluster to truly work in parallel because users can be dynamically routed to the server with the least load. This enables all resources on all servers to be utilized to their fullest extent.
Execution Speed
DIG is designed to execute as quickly as possible, spending as little time as needed executing on the server. The faster the code executes on each server, the more users each server can support requiring fewer servers to support and given number of users.
Internationalization Support
You can set the language used to display GUI text and data in Digital Information Gateway (DIG™). DIG supports virtually all languages.
If the data in your data source(s) is stored in Unicode format, then DIG can display it without any need for special configuration or translations. Typical foreign languages that can be supported are:
US English
Arabic
French
Hindi
virtually any and all languages can be supported
The Digital Information Gateway (DIG™) software architecture supports all of these features. This means that DIG can be clustered with an unlimited number of physical servers that work in parallel to fulfill user requests. In benchmark tests at Visual Analytics, DIG boasted 100+ queries per second on a single Dell Server priced under $10K. To translate this into an approximate number of users, we will assume that 1000 concurrent users are each performing a new query every 10 seconds.
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Here are a few tips and tricks to help you use DIG quickly and more efficiently.
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...that DIG ships with a Report Template to ease the production of reports for your data?
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When you access the DIG Reports and select the My Reports option, you will see a Report Template icon.
 Click on this icon to select it, and then click the "Edit Report" button to open the template.
This template provides the basic design elements needed to generate custom reports based or user requirements and preferences.
The DIG Report Logo is shown in the "ReportHeader" section of this report template. It can be replaced with any Logo that exists in a typical graphic file format (.bmp, .gif, .jpg, .jpeg, png, .ica, .emf, .wmf).
The "ReportHeader" section is displayed on the first page of the report only. It is an easy way to generate a table of contents or include distribution information that users do not want to see on all subsequent pages.
The "PageHeader" can be used for report headings or report titles that display on all report pages.
The "GroupHeader(s)" section can be used for column labels or repetitive headers that will appear on each detail page of the report. It can also contain data values from the search objects returned by DIG queries.
The "Detail" section can contain both labels and search object values.
The footers ("GroupFooter(s), "PageFooter" and "ReportFooter") provide similar functionality to the headers, but display below the data detail.
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DIG 2.0 includes a number of new features as well as significant improvements to existing features. These include:
| Server-to-Server - Securely and selectively share data across organizations to enable web-based access from any physical location
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| Flexible Architecture - The DIG 2.0 Server and Client applications are written entirely in Microsoft .NET. This provides a fully web-based solution that eliminates geographic limitations and concerns
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| "No-Touch" Deployment - Users get rich client functionality without requiring software installations on user PCs and workstations. All they need is the Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1. The Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1 (runtime product) is provided free of charge by Microsoft and included in the DIG install process
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| Enterprise Administrator - Manage data sources, users, permissions, database access, indexes, and more from the completely re-designed DIG Server interface
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| Enhanced Interface - All new design makes searching and reporting easier than ever
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| Search Builder - Build simple, compound and complex database and text searches all at once using a simple search interface
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| Object Walk - Use your search results to instantly search all of your data sources for matching values
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| E-mail Connector - Search millions of e-mail messages and attachments in tens of seconds
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| "Data Transformation - Multiple on-the-fly data view formats allow users to perform advanced analysis on search results
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| High Availability - Maintain service availability even when a server within a clustered network goes down
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| Reporting - Manage, publish and share report templates throughout the enterprise using the drag-and-drop designer to create custom reports
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| Export - Save your search results to a number of formats
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| Web Services API - Access the DIG "Virtual Data Warehouse" from within your custom .NET, Java, or C++ application to search and retrieve information from databases, documents, web sites, and e-mails
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The DIG Client interface has been completely redesigned to provide the easiest-to-use, most flexible and most powerful search and retrieval interface available.
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