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| By Birket Foster, as posted at 3000
newswire |
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| The trouble with today's growing investment
in IT is that everything is integrated --
and this makes the HP 3000 an island of
data in your organization. In order to bridge
between this platform and others, there
are several things that need to occur. The
obvious items have to do with what data
needs to be moved, when and how often. The
technology stack in such a solution will
need to address these issues: |
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- How to connect to and select from
the database
- How to move the data across a network
to a target database
- How to add to or create the database
on the target platform
- How to deal with data type differences
(precision of numbers, item name length,
table name length)
- Endian differences (byte order for
integers is can different on different
platforms)
- What to do with dates (SQL has its
strict rules around date and date-time
fields)
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| For a one time move - perhaps a special
project to get certain information on a
group of customers who bought a product
in the past two years - the scope is easy
and the target can just have fields that
are selectively populated. |
| For a continuous feed of data - perhaps
to an ODS (Operational Data Store), DataMart
or to another application - the problem
becomes more complex. After all, the need
to move data between platforms is becoming
a business driver. We have customers taking
advantage of our J2EE technology to integrate
into a Java environment with JINI, EJB,
JTS and SSL support. All of this has allowed
the HP 3000 to play as an equal in the Enterprise
Data Bus Architecture. But where to start
your bridging sparks a good set of questions. |
| to outline your requirements:
Does there need to be a start date? What
data needs to be captured, and how do we
identify the data required? Is it transactional
data, or updates to a file selected by timestamp?
Is it synchronous data, or just an hourly,
daily, weekly or monthly data sweep that
is required? Once we have some candidate
data, how will it be checked for integrity
before it is sent to the application or
database? Is there a way to make sure (via
audit) that all the transactions were correctly
posted to the target database and none were
missed? |
| We have been helping customers with synching
data for over 15 years and moving data for
over 25 years. We have helped customers
with the ECTL process (that's Extract Clean
Transform and Load) as well as creating
a data quality focus to clean up the data
before the project is implemented. We often
get to discuss the history policy and lifecycle
of the data. |
| We ask when and how many transactions
of what kinds are produced and how long
are the full details required. We want to
know when and how do summaries play in the
trending and decision making process. Customers
need to know what data they want to share
with suppliers and customers. Who needs
the data internally, and what else do they
need to do their job? |
| Whether you plan on a project for synchronizing
data, or moving it one time, or doing periodic
refreshes, there is a framework required
before you can start the project. |
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| We have been evolving our solutions to
help customers with these problems since
we first took data from an Image database
and built Oracle "loader" files
in 1985. Our UDA (Universal Data Access)
series was built with the philosophy that
we should be database - and operating system
- "agnostic". We have evolved
to go beyond the HP 3000 to include Oracle,
SQLServer, DB2, Sybase, Ingres, Cache, Eloquence,
PostgreSQL, and MySQL, all to work with
UNIX, Linux, Windows, AS400 and more. |
| The objective is to allow "drag and
drop" data transformation between any
of the databases regardless of source and
target platform. We typically pull or push
data at the rate of 5-10 million records
per hour. |
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| We still support the HP 3000 with all
of its file types - Image, Allbase, KSAM,
and flat files. UDALink which includes ODBC,
JDBC and easy to use MBF-Reporter capability
is being used daily by thousands of users
in hundreds of sites. We add new copies
as customers discover that they need 64-bit
clients to support ODBC access to the HP
3000. |
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| For many customers we have been replacing
ODBCLink/SE, a product we licensed to HP
from 1996-2006 for bundling into MPE/iX.
Now we are five years beyond supporting
that product for HP, we find that customers
are moving to new versions of Windows Server
or SQLServer, triggering the need for a
new client to connect to the HP 3000 data
source or in the occasional case an HP 9000
running Allbase. We continue to evolve the
solution and so have added XML, XLS, and
PDF as output types of reports, CSV, and
several self-describing file types. |
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| For the past 10 years, our customers have
been able to use .NET applications with
ODBC and for our RPC mechanism. The RPC
mechanism makes XLs on an HP 3000 available
to a Microsoft environment just like they
are libraries (both .COM and .NET work).
The RPC mechanism takes code compiled on
the HP3000 (in COBOL, C, C++, Pascal, Fortran
and so on) and allows the Microsoft based
development environment to leverage the
tried and true business logic without having
to duplicate the logic. This goes beyond
data to allow the 3000 more of a role in
the architecture for new and current systems. |
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| The HP 3000 may be gone from the supported
platform list, for HP but there exists a
small cadre of dedicated companies who know
the HP 3000 and will help customers who
must homestead to get the most from their
systems. Over the past 10 years since HP's
announcement of the plan to phase out 3000
support MB Foster has continued to support
its solutions for data access and delivery.
We have added products and services that
help the HP 3000 application environment.
Beyond the data, MB Foster is helping customers
with application support - we have expertise
to help write reports or modify business
logic in COBOL, FORTRAN, Powerhouse, C,
C++, and other legacy languages. |
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| If a customer does decide to move from
an HP 3000, we have those services too.
We have helped customers with data since
1985 and with transitioning applications
since 2001. We also do a lot of work on
planning the transition (contact us for
our "build, buy or migrate" webinar)
and the decommissioning process: to transfer
data to the new application, first for testing
and then for production cutover -- and then
finally to preserve data for historic purposes,
and compliance reasons. |
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| The word "Legacy" means treasure.
And in the case of the HP 3000 the treasure
is huge - a highly reliable system that
rarely fails (a mean time between reboots
is most often measured in years) and reliably
runs millions upon millions of transactions
across a wide range of industries from education
through local government, healthcare, manufacturing,
transportation, pharmaceuticals, and retail.
At MB Foster we are striving to keep the
HP 3000 and its legacy applications and
data as an asset for our customers. |
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| Whether it is a software product, migration
project, data services, or project management,
MB Foster makes it easy to deliver the right
information to the right person at the right
time. We work with our customers to streamline
their IT business operations to reduce costs,
improve delivery, and grow revenues for
our customers. To call us with questions
contact us at 1-800ANSWERS (800-267-9377)
See us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/MBFosterAssociates
or on the Web at www.MBFoster.com.
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