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In this episode:

• Testimonial of the Moment
• Newer, faster, chunkier syncs
• Process isolation and your keyboard focus
• Zero-downtime server upgrades
• Automatic login screens
• 97% more fun than that other guy's newsletter

Testimonial of the MonthMoment

Here's a great quote that just came in a few days ago:

I was thinking about a design for a new multi-user Access project that I have been asked to build for some time. EQL OnWeb gives me the motivation to build it now. The technology is simple, straightforward, and easy to update. The barrier between desktop and web has finally been broken.

-- Brad Durbin, Credit Detailer, LLC

When we started EQL, we figured people would take their existing Access applications and put them on the web. But it turns out that most EQL customers want to do a major overhaul or make something totally new.

Our print-to-pdf reporting feature leads people to imagine new user interfaces. Some people want to add custom login screens. Others take the fancy graphics out of their Access app so that it embeds more seamlessly as a small part of their company's web site - which already has fancy graphics.

We love the fact that EQL gives you new ways to work with Access. That's what we're all about!

Newer, faster, chunkier syncs

One new EQL plugin feature we're especially proud of is called "chunk-based database synchronization." That's a complicated way to say that if you change a small part of your form - for example, moving or resizing an image - and then resync, you don't re-upload the entire form. You only upload the parts of the form that have changed. With big forms, that can take your sync time from several minutes down to several seconds.

Chunking even works if you move an image from one form to another, or from one database to another!

If you want to know the gory details of how chunking works, you can read about it in this blog article.

Process isolation and your keyboard focus

In the last month or so, more and more people have reported a weird problem that screwed up your keyboard focus. You'd be typing away in your OnWeb session, and suddenly your input cursor would disappear - and you'd have to click in the window before you could resume typing.

Some people saw this problem a lot, and some people not at all. We had a lot of trouble replicating it down here at EQL. What we found was your keyboard focus wasn't disappearing, it was being stolen by another instance of Access altogether! The busier our servers got, the more it would happen.

To fix it, we had to do what we call "process isolation." It was a lot more work than it sounds like, and we apologize for the delay in getting it out to you. But the problem should be gone for good.

Zero-downtime server upgrades

Process isolation also brings us another great feature: zero-downtime server upgrades. In other words, we can now upgrade our EQL server software even while your OnWeb sessions are running.

Once upon a time, we used to imagine that most EQL OnWeb users would be in North America like us, and would go to bed at a reasonable hour. So we (or rather, our night owl sysadmins) could just upgrade our servers in the middle of the night, right?

That was true at first, but nowadays there are people using OnWeb 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and the middle of the night for us is the middle of the day in Australia or Singapore. There's no good time for downtime.

Easier server upgrades mean we can deploy bugfixes and new features even faster and more frequently than before, and all the servers in our cluster will always be on the latest version. That means your problems get solved faster. Enjoy!

Automatic login screens

A lot of people have asked us how to make sure users can't access their database without logging in. One way is to build your own login form in Access, which gives you total control. But if you want something a little quicker, check out our knowledgebase article about the EqlUsers table. It's a new feature that might save you some time.

And the rest...

Since last month, we've made more little tweaks and improvements to EQL than we can count. (Actually our tracking software counts them for us. There are exactly 127.) All that put together has finally made us confident enough to raise our software version number to 2.0.

All those great improvements are only possible thanks to your feedback. Every day more and more people start using OnWeb for their databases, big and small, and we love to hear how our product works for you. Please feel free to reply to this email or send a message to info@eqldata.com. Or request features (and vote on them!) by visiting http://eql.uservoice.com.

Have fun,

Avery Pennarun
Co-founder, EQL Data Inc.

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