CURRENT_MEETING_REPORT_ Reported by Daisy Shen/IBM NetData Minutes This is the third meeting of the Working Group Chaired by Daisy Shen. The meeting Agenda is shown below: o Reviewed the charter. o Reviewed the the draft. o Discussed the draft and problems that are related to the subject. o Reported the status of the first implementation. o Looked for the second implementation. o Discussed the effort of other vendors and OSF related to the subject. o Future Work. Reviewed the Charter Most the attendees were new to the Working Group; therefore, we reviewed the Charter and agreed that we met the Charter and the milestones on the schedule December 1991. Although the group was small, a lot of valuable discussions were held. Reviewed the Draft The original draft was separated in two documents. One is the protocol itself, and the other is implementation information. We reviewed both documents. The most terrible mistake was a typo of ASN. Members suggested that the draft should define the requirements more clearly rather than explain one of the alternatives. Once the requirements are defined, it is up to the implementer which alternative to choose to implement Network Database System. It is a very valuable suggestion. The draft will be revised according to the suggestion. Discussed the draft and problems that are related to the subject We discussed some problems and resolutions during last meeting at Atlanta. We continued to discuss more issues, and resolved the following issues: 1. Multiple threads between clients and a server o Unit of Work 2. Multiple servers on a host o Program number and Port number 1 3. Data Buffers o Database <--> DB Utility <--> Server <--> Client 4. Data conversion o Character strings with ASN.1 and BER(Basic Encoding Rules) 5. Security o Security is required, but the protocol should not be limited to Kerberos only. Kerberos is suggested, but not required. The implementer can choose a means that suits their own system. Reported the status of the first implementation A version of Sun Microsystems <--> IBM VM is implemented. It follows the draft except for data conversion. It does not use ASN.1 but a somewhat similar method to manage data conversion. Looked for the second implementation We are looking for volunteers to do the second implementation. There is a good possibility. Discussed the effort of other vendors related to the subject We would like to know more about the work that the SQL access group has done, but we could not. Future Work o Update the protocol draft and provide a clear requirements. o Discuss Error Recovery. o Compare the performance of data conversion between the first implementation and using ASN.1. o Give a presentation on ASN.1. o Give a presentation on ISO standard. o Run a demo. o Contact the Operational Statistics Working Group. o Find volunteers to do the second version of the implementation. Attendees L. Dain Gary ldg@cert.sei.cmu.edu William Jackson jackson@manta.nosc.mil Dale Johnson dsj@merit.edu Bill Melohn melohn@auspex.com Mark Needleman mhn@stubbs.ucop.edu Robert Purvy bpurvy@us.oracle.com Harvey Shapiro shapiro@wnyose.nctsw.navy.mil 2 Daisy Shen daisy@watson.ibm.com 3