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This is the 12th installment in a continuing series of articles featuring Data Propagation System (DPS), Treehouse Software’s ADABAS-to-RDBMS product implementation, in several “real world” environments. DPS is a robust product that provides modeling and data migration of legacy ADABAS data into modern RDBMS-based platforms for Internet/Intranet/Business Intelligence applications. DPS’s modeling and mapping facility (tRelational) auto-generates complete RDBMS schema from existing ADABAS files and allows for easy mapping of ADABAS fields to already existing data warehouse or ERP schema. After the mapping is completed, DPS can materialize (initially load) and propagate (keep synchronized) the ADABAS data into the RDBMS without requiring direct access to ADABAS. Whether a site is completely replacing a legacy ADABAS system with an RDBMS-based system as was done at the University of Maine, or if the need is a long-term data transfer and synchronization solution for data warehousing/Internet/Intranet/ERP applications, DPS is the answer.
John St. Peter, Lead Database Administrator at the University of Maine System, illustrates how DPS, Treehouse Software’s best-of-breed product, helped put the University’s mainframe system on the fast track to its new home—on time and under budget. The University of Maine System chose DPS for migration of their legacy ADABAS data as part of their plan to move from the mainframe by the end of 2009. John writes to us: The University of Maine System consists of 7 unique universities with a student body of 32,000. Certain administrative systems are centrally managed for all universities by the University of Maine System. The large majority of ADABAS files supported three ADABAS applications: Nearly all students and faculty, and a large number of administrative staff, used systems that accessed the data stored in ADABAS, 24x7. The student and the financial aid systems were the lifeblood of the University system. The mainframe ADABAS systems consisted of over 200 ADABAS files and 100 million records of data. The University of Maine System had been a Software AG customer since 1987 and used ADABAS and Natural extensively. The student system was written in COBOL, but all reporting was done with Natural, and the financial aid and financials systems were written in Natural. The mainframe ran both VM/CMS and VSE as operating systems. Depending on the applications, on-line access to the data was through web, IVR, and CICS systems. Batch access was done via CMS and VSE, with all large batch jobs running in VSE. On Target, and On Track… Fully involved with our ERP implementation, we had neither the staff nor the time to manually do all the preparatory work in migrating the hundreds of files and tens of thousands of fields to Oracle, so it was decided to look for a vendor solution. It was a very easy decision to go with Treehouse Software. They came in with the best price, had the tools to meet our needs, and in our case, had a proven track record, as we had been satisfied long-time users of their TRIM and AUDITRE products for over 20 years. Race Against Time…
Moving 100 million rows of data seven times, along with the additional rows created to support PEs and MUs, meant pushing more than one billion rows of data around, so we didn’t have time to fix problems on the fly during our final push. Treehouse’s products had to run quickly, and they had to run well... And they did. Since some of our systems made good use of the non-relational ADABAS PE and MU features, we didn’t know how well or how easily these would convert to Oracle. Treehouse Software Provides a Smooth and Fast Ride The materialization steps also went smoothly for us. Because of our time constraints and because of the number of points our data had to go through, it was important that these steps go quickly and flawlessly during our final push. On our system, DPS could perform the materialization at speeds over 1 million rows per minute depending on the file. We were also able to have DPS work with our largest files by working on just a part of the data with each pass, usually about 2 million records at a time. We took advantage of another DPS feature to help ensure that our final push would work as smoothly as possible. Ahead of the final push, we had DPS do a practice materialization and report on non-character data in character fields, which could disrupt the later FTP or SQL Loader steps. Identifying and resolving the patterns of bad data turned out to be more time-intensive than we thought and no one solution was right for all data, although one option that DPS could perform, and which we used on some files, was for DPS to clean up the data itself. Using DPS in practice runs to check on bad data meant that data issue surprises were kept to a minimum during our final push to Oracle. Whether we had design choices with the modeling tool or questions about DPS, Treehouse would respond promptly and accurately, so we were never delayed by the tools. Success Leads to a Parting of Ways Just one example of the support that Treehouse Software provided occurred when a useful feature of their modeling program was not available in the version we were using (we needed to use the previous version of the tool because of our environment). On his own initiative, the technical rep onsite contacted support, and within just a few hours, that feature had been retrofitted to the earlier version of the product and the patch was sent to us and applied. I have only rarely experienced a vendor going to those lengths for a customer. One of the drawbacks of the movement off ADABAS and Natural for us is that after 20 years of working with Treehouse we no longer have them as a vendor. DPS and tRelational Literature and Presentations:Download other TSI product documentation sets and Powerpoint presentations.
Contact Treehouse Software Today!To receive more information about DPS, or to request a free 30-day trial, contact Treehouse Software or your Treehouse affiliate. TSI is looking for reference sites for the DPS software. If you are interested in becoming a DPS reference site in exchange for special pricing and other considerations, contact TSI today! TREEHOUSE
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