Studio paints two faces on IMAGE move, migrations

GUI workbench provides jump-start for data movement outside 3000

HP 3000 shops will hear about many products this year which promise to help migrate away from the platform. Some are being offered by companies with deep MPE experience. Only a few have potential for working alongside HP 3000 databases now, as well as enabling migrations in the future.

Taurus Software (www.taurus.com, 650.961.1323) counts on a deep 3000 community background. Founded by HP 3000 development and operations veterans, the company released its first MPE product in 1987, when Chameleon let customers emulate the then-new PA-RISC HP 3000 operating system on Classic MPE V systems. This month its DataBridger software gets a graphical interface with Studio, a GUI workbench that helps HP 3000 sites move data outside the realm of IMAGE with a point and click interface.

DataBridger has already been in service for several years, moving IMAGE data onto Microsoft’s SQL Server and Oracle databases. The customers using the product have been HP 3000 sites with a need to massage transaction data inside data warehouses, or deploy it to the Web for applications which couldn’t work with IMAGE. A relatively small group of customers have used DataBridger to move some of their 3000 applications onto other platforms, synchronizing in-house apps with suites like Oracle Financials.

Taurus said the focus of the product hasn’t been on migration in its first few years. The company developed software to give data running in programs like Amisys applications or MANMAN modules a second life on Windows NT servers or out in HP-UX systems. But while coexistence was the primary mission of the product, HP’s November signal of the end of its 3000 support gives DataBridger more urgency for its second task: replacing a 3000 starting from the database and moving up.

Studio offers a GUI look for that complex mission, a way to move IMAGE datasets into relational databases without writing detailed scripts. Taurus CEO John Murphy said the new GUI component, which has been in beta test through the fall, lets sites get started moving data without studying a language.

“It allows you to build, quite easily, data movement logic,” Murphy said. A procedural language created several years ago by Taurus directs dataset movement into Oracle and SQL Server databases. It can even keep track of existing IMAGE dependencies between master and detail datasets, dependencies it then establishes in the target database outside the 3000.

Up until this month, creating this logic has been a task of typing code into DataBridger, aided by tutorials as well as advice and consulting from Taurus experts. The Studio breakthrough is meant to eliminate a serious part of the work to use DataBridger — more than half, according to Taurus president Caliean Sherman.

“The GUI can do 60 percent of what everybody wants,” Sherman said, “but they still have the other 40 percent. We’ve got a procedural language behind it for that.” The extra comes from the complexity of database movement, she explained. “They think oh, I’m going to do it all point and click,” she said.

Studio is the next generation of graphical interface to data movement for Taurus. Several years ago it put a Forklift front-end on the main engine for DataBridger, Warehouse. Sherman said doing implementations for customers since Forklift taught the company a lot about the process the customers were employing with DataBridger.

Once changes to databases are captured by Taurus DataBridger and Studio, they can work with Quest Software’s NetBase/Shareplex data shadowing software in a solution the two companies call BridgeWare. These are the kinds of solutions that need the extra power of a language. “A piece of logic can be written for a data movement engine in our language which will move those changed records where you need them moved,” Murphy said. In this kind of configuration, data is moved automatically to non-3000 platforms, replicating only changed portions of the database to speed up access.

That’s a complex transfer, considering how different IMAGE and Oracle are structured under the surface. IMAGE hasn’t ever demanded strict type checking, so things like dates can be in any X field. Oracle uses date fields, which Taurus reps said can choke on the unchecked data coming out of IMAGE databases.

“It’s impossible to tell what records have changed in IMAGE” without some kind of metadata, Murphy said, another element of the BridgeWare solution. This Change Detect Process sits at the MPE/iX system level on the HP 3000, reading message files to sift through the IMAGE transactions.

The practice of moving data in manageable chunks from HP 3000s into outside databases is growing in popularity among sites with multiple database platforms. Most of the sites in the Taurus customer base continue to use their HP 3000s in production, giving the data more value with the extra business intelligence that advanced reporting produces. They gain the value through their own use of DataBridger, or pay Taurus to do the work.

“There are two kinds of customers,” Sherman said, “those who want to buy the product and do it all themselves, and those who want us to do everything. Big customers want you to do it for them.” A typical big customer has five databases of 200 tables each being replicated in real time, she said, “and I’ll tell you, the most time-consuming part of the whole project is validating that what you said was going to get over there actually got over there.”

Murphy explained that “dirty data” lives inside most production databases, something customers need to decide how to clean up once they see a sample of the data in Oracle or SQL Server after a transfer.

Data migration has a number of lessons learned once data leaves the friendly confines of IMAGE’s all-types-allowed datasets, Murphy added. “Sixty to 80 percent of the total work goes into ‘dirty data’ in a data movement operation,” he said. “IMAGE is renowned for letting people store invalid dates in character date fields. That’s why you move one table at a time, then run reporting programs on your migrated data. If you try to move those without correcting them, you will get a nasty hiccup from Oracle.”

Studio will be selling for $5,000 for five developer seats to the Taurus customers already using DataBridger or BridgeWare, but a customer starting from scratch can expect to budget between $15,000 to $100,000 for the total solution, depending on the size of HP 3000 they use. That kind of investment can be offset by a rental program for the software, where a $5,000 fee provides six months of use and can be renewed for additional six-month periods.

A site assessment to create a project plan begins the process of using the Taurus solution, whether or not the vendor’s consulting work is included — consulting billed at $150 an hour. “Most people think they’re going to do it themselves from the start, regardless of how they end up,” Sherman said. Projects range from 50 hours to thousands of hours. Moving data outside HP 3000s can be a lengthy process, one the Taurus customers are beginning as a way to enhance their 3000 data’s value.

“We expect it to be very useful for folks who are planning to migrate, in the short term as well as the long term,” Murphy said. Offering a tool with more than one mission gives sites options, he believes. “Of the people we’ve talked to, many aren’t in any hurry to make a decision on getting off the 3000. They see they’ve got some leisure.”