Announced at HP World and demonstrated over the fall’s Transition Tour, DBMotion made its debut this month with a free, limited use demo available on the Speedware Web site. The software sends IMAGE, TurboIMAGE and IMAGE/SQL data into SQL Server and Oracle databases on HP-UX and Linux platforms. The transition to Oracle requires that an Oracle client be in place on a Windows server, even if the target is Linux. DBMotion was announced with support for DISC’s Omnidex and OmniAccess indexing for Oracle and IMAGE, and Speedware is working out the last remaining issues on Omnidex support during this first month of release. “As most people are only beginning to plan for migration we feel this won’t be a significant issue,” said Speedware’s Nicolas Fortin, “since we plan to release a new version or patch supporting Omnidex to OmniAccess [conversion] within February.”

Migrating data from the HP e3000 has traditionally proven to be a considerable challenge, but Speedware looks like it has designed DBmotion to address a real need in the 3000 community — migrating data from the HP 3000 to popular relational databases. The software is selling for $10,000 per server license, a price that lets customers migrate “any number of complete databases from one specific HP e3000 server to any number of PC clients, target servers and databases.” It can also can be rented for $3,000 per month. Download the demo to run on your Windows NT/2000 systems at www.speedware.com/dbmotion. We expect to take the DBMotion offering out for a TestDrive in an upcoming issue of the NewsWire.