Biggest highlights
The biggest change of JuxtAPPose v3.0 is purely based on a full migration of the project to a new technology platform that serves as foundation for the new incoming changes and evolution of this tool starting with a better stability and compatibility of different Windows versions as now the installation is a contains the vast majority of the dependencies.
This change also promoted the adoption of newer and better practices on memory and thread management, while these changes are not as easy to spot for the average user, an additional and much more exciting change is a performance improvement which in the internal tests translated to over 27% faster comparison for millions of rows and 15 columns and for the standard torture test between 30% and 32% for 1.9 million rows with over 80 columns, as times goes by JuxtAPPose Standard is now well over 11X faster compared to v1.0 so these “torture tests” will eventually have to be replaced with heavier data samples, for now those will be just named as “standard data tests” for consistency.
And last but absolutely not least, this change opens the window for a possible future UI upgrade for a possible cross platform capability, more to that in further releases, stay tuned!
Welcome comparison under schedule!
With the strongest (and boring) changes out of the way, it’s time to talk about the most thrilling new feature which came after many of you (!) asked, and is the arrival of “comparisons on schedule”, just as the name suggests, this is the ability of the tool to execute a comparison on a schedule (previously saved as favorite), this new screen behind the scenes what it does is to talk directly with the already built in task scheduler from the operative system, this decision was taken to not add a new agent running in the background that can take resources from the PC (JuxtAPPose Standard and FREE are built thinking they will be used from low spec laptops to high end desktops) but changes don’t stop only there, this means now JuxtAPPose Standard can receive parameters through command line, this opens a new set of possibilities, this new feature can work with the following scheduling capabilities:
One time: Executes a favorite at a given date and time
Daily: Executes a favorite starting at a specific date and time
Weekly: Starting at a specific date and time, choosing the days of the week to run
After a schedule is created, it is possible to disable and re-enable it as needed but you can also always delete it.
UI Changes
Individual data extractions & Connection Manager
This is the first version that changes an already existing component in the UI, this change consists on replacing the buttons with the green plus sign to summon the connection manager screen, those buttons were replaced for the new functionality which is the new ability to independently extract the data from source A or B, this is because there are occasions when one or both of the data sources take a long time to perform a data extraction and being able to only load both sources in sequence wasn’t a great user experience. The new way to call the connection manager screen is now in the drop down to choose connections, it now will always show as the last item of the list.
Disabled controls
A new behavior can be spotted in the main window for comparisons that take longer than 2 seconds, as different buttons get disabled for preventing accidental clicks on actions that can create confusion among new users, once the comparison is completed or stopped, all buttons are re-enabled.
Connectivity
In the connectivity side of things, we have DB2 joining as native support, no need to download and install ODBC components extra, this behavior will eventually arrive for other already supported connections, this change comes as one of the benefits of the platform migration.
Improved query editor
Keeping up with the appetite improvement from the hardcore users, there comes an improved query editor which now supports SQL code highlighting, very handy for those situations when changing the query from any of the source requires special attention.
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