Why is completing the next version of License Statistics taking so long? During the past fall, we invested more development resources in License Statistics than in any of our other products, and still the progress seems slow. Yet, finally, we see a light at the end of the tunnel.
The fact that the work on License Statistics has taken so long is really no wonder, because the changes to this upcoming version have been a massive undertaking! Since v3.0 of License Statistics, we’ve completed more than 145 issues. It’s safe to say that the new version will be a surprise for many customers, because we’ve re-engineered almost all the core parts of the software.
Currently, as several License Statistics beta users know, we’ve replaced the embedded SQLite database with an embedded MySQL database. The existing database simply could not scale to the needs of our clients. Some existing customer setups store more than 95 million records, which require almost 10 GB of space for the database alone.
Don’t worry; you won’t need to be a database expert to run the new software. We’ve paid special attention to ensuring that the new database works embedded and without configuration as it did previously. On the other hand, external databases are an option for those who want enhanced scalability and operability in terms of insight, custom reporting and backups.
The first time you load the new version of License Statistics, it will convert your existing SQLite databases to MySQL. This is a one-time procedure required for the new version to work. Although we’ve spent hundreds of hours to optimize the process, it’s still time consuming. For a typical environment, the conversion takes less than 1 day to complete. However, for large setups, such as those with 95 million records, it takes up to 5 days.
Why is this needed? Because MySQL is a far superior database and License Statistics can do calculations at the time it inserts records instead of having to run overnight. As a result, we’ve been able to remove the nightly graph generation; instead, everything is now done in real time.
With the database work completed, we’ve turned our attention to improving the web-based user interface, with our first goal being to replace Analyzer. We’re working on this at the time of this writing, and thousands of lines of web-based code have already been written in order to achieve easy report generation.
Our ultimate goal is to replace all the individual tools, including editing of databases and custom reports, in order to provide everything from a web-based user interface. This is a lengthy process though as it requires rewriting nearly the entire application. So far, we’ve only rewritten half of it. 
If there are no further delays, soon we will release License Statistics v3.5, which will no longer include Analyzer. In the release following v3.5, we’ll focus on creating a web-based tool for custom reports.
We’ve implemented many features in this upcoming release that were not possible before: importing of license manager log files, user-authentication, and a much more efficient user interface for navigation and manipulation.
Rewriting half of the product is by no means trivial. Thousands of man hours have been invested in this release, and we’re getting close to the finish line. After all the hard work that’s gone into License Statistics, we’re certainly looking forward to presenting you with a far superior product this year. I believe you’ll find that the effort has been well worth the wait.
