Today on Technology Tuesday, why OpenQM is definitely worth a close look when planning the future of your business applications.
What is OpenQM and Why Should I Care?
OpenQM™, more commonly abbreviated to QM, is a combined development and runtime environment that allows construction of application software in a fraction of the time taken with some other widely used but significantly more expensive development toolsets. QM has a managed application environment in which user programs run, resulting in high reliability and ease of maintenance. Compiled applications are portable across all platforms (Windows, Linux, OS X, AIX, etc) unless operating system specific features are incorporated into the application by the developer.
Proponents of the well-known (and often expensive) relational database products sometimes dismiss MultiValue databases as being an insignificant or antiquated technology that has no relevance in today’s business world. This is simply not true. Many of the world’s largest and most successful companies use MultiValue technology. MultiValue is well established as a proven technology that can handle big data and the complexity of today’s applications.
Enhanced Security in OpenQM Release 3.4-11
The news media is packed with stories of companies of all sizes who have suffered theft or loss of data as a result of malicious activity. The impact of losing data can largely be mitigated by having effective backup policies though it is alarming how often we read of researchers losing data that took years to gather.
Theft of data is potentially a bigger problem as exposure of confidential business data may lead to all manner of consequences ranging from loss of investor confidence in the company to widespread financial loss for the company’s clients due to release of bank details. Data encryption certainly helps but it is best used in conjunction with measures that prevent the hacker reaching the data in the first place. A worryingly large number of business applications have “secret” codes, sometimes blatantly obvious, that when entered at a menu take the user to a command prompt. Once there, the malicious user often has freedom to access all data on the server, including that which belongs to other applications.
For users running on Linux/Unix, the operating system has a simple access permissions mechanism that can provide effective security for many applications but many system administrators just set the permissions wide open and trust that no one will discover the secret access code. One approach to improving security is to assign each application account an operating system security group and then ensure that the users who should have access to the application, and only those users, are granted membership of the group. This simple step effectively provides a firewall around each application account. This is not new. Access permissions have been a feature of Linux/Unix for ever. System administrators could use the operating system chgrp and chmod commands to manually set up security, revisiting it each time a new file is created.
OpenQM Release 3.4-11 simplifies this by adding permission and ownership options to the CREATE.ACCOUNT, CREATE.FILE and CONFIG.FILE commands. Setting a group id in this way also sets group inheritance such that subsequent creation of new files within the account automatically carries forward the group id associated with the file. Watch out for future enhancements to system security features with OpenQM.
Want to learn more? Read the full details on OpenQM’s most recent release here.
The History of OpenQM
OpenQM started life in 1993 as an embedded database in applications from Ladybridge Systems where the end user did not need to know about the underlying data storage technology. It was released in its own right in mid-2001 on Windows systems and extended to Linux in 2003 and FreeBSD in 2004. The users of this product can be found worldwide and span a wide range of industries. Since 1 January 2015, Zumasys has been worldwide sales and marketing partner.
Migration to OpenQM from other MultiValue environments is usually easy and can bring large financial savings. OpenQM is the only MultiValue database product that is actively taking the core capabilities of the QMBasic language forwards with support for features such as object oriented programming, exception handling and arbitrarily multi-dimensional data items that are invaluable in creating web based applications that use JSON.
Did you know that Zumasys is the worldwide distributor of OpenQM? Learn how Zumasys’ Software Development team can help you make the move to OpenQM today!