Radical Performance

When I was a kid, I helped my dad on the farm in plowing, disking and harrowing the fields to prepare for planting. A 30 acre field took perhaps 20 hours and four passes to prepare and plant. Today he prepares and plants that same field in under 3 hours. It isn't just bigger, faster equipment that enables this, but also new concepts and the associated new technology.

In the same way, new concepts and technologies are yielding dramatic performance improvements in software version control. For example, in RCS (a very old, but still used version control tool), each revision file contains all revisions and meta-data about one file. Project-wide operations require examining or modifying every such RCS file, a slow process and tedious if not automated.

By contrast, in SnapshotCM, this meta-data is stored in a database which provides orders of magnitude improvement in global operation performance. In addition, certain concepts, like setting a tag (or symbolic name) on all files to remember a state of a project, have been replaced with more advanced concepts, like using a virtual copy of a project to remember a state. The virtual copy has several key advantages:

• it applies to all attributes of a file, not just content
• it is space efficient (small constant space rather than O(n))
• it is time efficient (small constant time rather than O(n))
• it is more understandable.

All of these points are important, but this last point is perhaps the most important of all. After all, it is human bandwidth that is most at a premium. Making CM users more efficient, helping them do the right thing, improving their understanding -- all are worth much more than a faster system alone.

Radical Human Performance

SnapshotCM radically improves the user's performance by presenting concepts the user is already familiar with and displaying and interacting with objects graphically. Rather than forcing the use of branches and tags, SnapshotCM uses the simple and well understood concept of a copy, optimizes the implementation to make it time and space efficient, and presents the results graphically. The result is both performance and understanding simply not available anywhere else.

No-till planting has given my dad more free time now than when I was a kid, though he farms twice the ground. With advanced CM technology, you too can be more productive than ever before!

To see SnapshotCM in operation, register for a free SnapshotCM evaluation at http://www.truebluesoftware.com/.