Powerhouse 8.49 posts a stable, unspectacular 3000 upgrade

June 2004

Powerhouse 8.49 posts a stable, unspectacular 3000 upgrade

Cognos began shipping the 8.49 release of its Powerhouse development tool this spring, and some HP 3000 sites had an early look at the software before it went into wider release. John Pickering, a consultant and regular contributor to the PowerHouse mailing list, reports the release updates a product that companies will continue to rely upon while they stick with HP 3000s:

“We’ve taken the opportunity to move to 8.49 as part of the move to our new N-Class 380 box,” Pickering said. “We’ve been using it since mid-February in production. We moved all the source from a 969 running MPE 6.5 and PH 8.19 and simply recompiled everything. I seem to remember only a handful of programs out of several thousand not compiling — a slightly tighter syntax which caused some sloppy QTP runs not to compile because of unqualified items about which QTP would formerly have made some assumption which it is no longer prepared to make. Once compiled, everything worked as expected and without incident.

“New features for MPE/iX customers seem pretty scant. Support for Omnidex in Quick and QTP instead of just Quiz seems like the biggest, but we don’t use Omnidex. And there’s support for KSAM64 files, except that Qutil can’t build them. As well, the PowerHouse components will take the TZ system variable into consideration when determining systime if you ask it. “Most of the emphasis seems to be on supporting NT/2000/XP and DB2, plus Eloquence on Unix and Windows. Additionally there's been some further work smoothing the path for the VMS folks who have been grumpy for the last couple of releases when Cognos dropped a number of “VAXisms” from new versions.

“In summary, nothing spectacular for us 3000 folks. But that’s probably not a bad thing — just a safe and supported version which is likely to be our ‘parking’ version until a migration path is determined. The new box and a recent version of PowerHouse should keep us safe well past 2006. And enhanced support on other platforms only widens our range of migration destinations.”