Adager releases next-generation date therapy

Click here for Mitchell Humphrey & Co. sponsor message

Adager releases next-generation date therapy

Database utility uses customer field experience to increase scope of services, handle embedded dates

Using its field experience from the past to get a good look at the future, utility supplier Adager (800.533.7346) rolled out a 1998 version of its product for HP 3000 database administrators which the company considers its next generation of date therapy.

The software has new functionality that addresses many more date formats and more complex date problems – features that result from the experience of handling more than 18 months of date-related work at customer sites. General manager Rene Woc said Adager’s date routines, used around the world to resolve Year 2000 problems since 1996, have been completely rewritten to add new functionality.

“We don’t suffer from the previous investment trap here,” Woc said. “We started working on the next release [to handle date changes] within weeks of putting out the first release. It was a worthwhile effort for cases that started appearing right after we released our first version of date therapy.”

It’s those months of working with customers who use Adager that have led to many of the enhancements in the 1998 release, such as the ability to examine and change embedded dates. That means the product supports fillers around date fields. For example, an X10 item may contain “ABC970123W” using a 3-byte prefix “ABC” followed by a 6-byte date field “970123” and a 1-byte suffix “W.” After conversion with Adager's revamped Change Date command, this item can end up as an X10 item “AC1997023W,” one which contains a 2-byte prefix “AC” followed by a 7-byte year and day-of-year date “1997023” and a 1-byte suffix “W.”

The ability to work with dates embedded in ASCII fields reaches even deeper into the work companies must do to prepare for the millennium shift. Such embedded dates are commonplace in HP 3000 applications, and customers appear grateful for a tool to address the complexity.

“Adager is saving us untold pain,” said a database administrator at a large aerospace company which has been an Adager customer for decades. Woc explained that the company uses a tool code which contains a date embedded in the field.

The Boeing application is typical of programs that have been mission-critical for many years and are now making the millennium transition. “Some of these applications were moved over from System 3 computers and IBM 360s,” Woc said, “where they didn’t even have a database to work with. Changing dates is much more than putting in a century. The data is usually embedded.”

HP 3000 consultant Cecile Chi added, “It looks like Adager has outdone itself in an effort to protect people from some of the weird methods system designers have used. That capability of handling embedded dates must have been a big job to implement.”

The software allows customers to specify the deletion or addition of a filler byte to comply with IMAGE's requirement of an even-byte length per item. In the earlier example, the deletion of the second filler prefix byte “B” was specified. Adager can also add a new filler byte anywhere and initialize it to any value a customer chooses. In the above example, a filler byte could be added in position 4 with an initial value of “M” to get an X12 “ABCM1997023W” result.

The product’s Examine Date function now provides two analyses of date-oriented information. It checks for legality and logs exceptions to uncover dates that are null, zero, blank, out of legal bounds, comprised of repeated characters, or garbage. Examine Date also finds dates which are earlier, later or equal to a given date, as well retaining its capability from the previous version to find within or outside a range of dates.

The new version of Change Date works with the Examine Date information to handle ASCII and binary date-oriented values in a variety of formats. “Proprietary” bit packed formats such as PowerHouse, MM/3000, HP Calendar and SRN’s Chronos remain on the new list, and Adager automatically cascades changes across all fields which are related by means of paths – whether they have the same item name or not. The processes cover search fields and automatically rehash masters with changed date oriented search-field values.

There’s plenty of control. Adager preserves the uniqueness of any invalid date data which may indicate a special condition to application programs. “For instance, Adager preserves dates with repeated characters as well as dates with illegal values whenever the target format allows it,” Woc said.

In addition to continuing support for all of the features in its earlier date therapy release, the 1998 release includes these exclusive features:

Redefined item types: Adager asks for the authentic type of date, regardless of the declared IMAGE type. “For instance, you may have ASCII yymmdd information in an item with IMAGE type binary J3,” Woc said.

Compounded dates: The product supports date-oriented items that have more than one subitem, such as 2X5 or 3J2.

Odd-byte lengths: Adager supports date types such as yyddd and yyyyddd (year and day-of-year) in X5 and X7 formats. “You need an even subitem count in these cases, to comply with IMAGE's rule that all items must have an even byte count,” Woc said.

He added that improvements to the product don’t stop with new date capabilities. The new version of the software:

• Supports the new b-tree indices in IMAGE, a feature Adager supported as soon as it was available from HP in Express 3 and Express 4 releases of MPE/iX 5.5 and later;

• Provides an enhanced reblocking function to help customers minimize disk space used by databases at the same time you change blocking factors of individual datasets. “This new function helps you minimize disk space used by databases or change blocking factors of individual datasets, independently of their disk space,” Woc said;

• Improves on its Consistency Check to detect and correct global database inconsistencies – features which have been instrumental in helping users recover from ongoing DDX problems;

• Supports ACDs for IMAGE databases, so users can customize the access to their databases. For example, the Apache/iX Web server uses ACDs to provide controlled access to IMAGE data.

The software’s cumulative feature set remains intact: support for third party indexing tools, dynamic datasets (DDX), jumbo datasets and NetBase/Shareplex shadowing.

The product continues to sell in Model One and Model Two versions for a flat price across all HP 3000 tiers with no upgrade fees: $2,000 for Model One (without Change Date features) and $6,500 for Model Two including Change Date and the full feature range of Adager. Yearly maintenance is at $300 and $1,000 respectively and current customers on support receive the 1998 version free.