Lattix 4.0 Management App Adds SQL Server Support

• By Kurt Mackie
• 02/29/08

Lattix this week is offering the latest version of its large-scale management and rearchitecting solution for service-oriented architectures and complex systems. The Andover, Mass.-based company released Lattix 4.0, which provides architects and designers with a high-level abstracted view of system-wide applications.

New to the product is support for Microsoft SQL Server, adding to existing product support for Oracle Database. The product has "new tagging, impact analysis and reporting capabilities" as well, according to an announcement issued by the company.

Lattix 4.0 represents a potentially easier way to isolate dependencies and enhance modularity in large systems. It now can manage systems that scale to "tens of millions of lines of code" and "hundreds of thousands of database entities," the company stated in its announcement.

The product is a step away from traditional model-driven development (MDD) views. Those MDD tools show data dependencies within applications via screens consisting of boxes and arrows. Such views are limited to about 20 to 25 boxes in a single model before the relationships become difficult to untangle, according to Neeraj Sangal, Lattix's president and founder.

Instead, Lattix's product uses a management method representing large systems that "looks like a spreadsheet," Sangal said, or a "Dependency Structure Matrix" (DSM). In a DSM view, numbers within the grid let architects easily see how application components depend on one another.  

The solution may seem simple, but Sangal said he has worked on this problem of modeling large systems for the last 15 years. He holds a patent "related to UML and model driven development technology," according to his bio.

More details on how DSM works in the management of complex systems is described in a paper by Sangal and colleagues from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where the DSM concept was initially developed according to Sangal.

Lattix offers its solution at various licensing costs, starting at $495 for the Professional Edition of Lattix 4.0. The product includes modules for "Ada, C/C++, Java (with Spring and Hibernate), .NET, Oracle, Pascal, and SQL Server," according to the company's announcement.

A free evaluation copy of the product can be downloaded here.