April 1996
QDUMP, ADAREORG, ADASTRIP, DBAUDIT, ADAMAGIC
PROFILER Helps Slim Down CPU Pigs
Formal Systems Inc. Year 2000 Article and Advertisement
Treehouse Software has been chosen to market and support in North America the following products of CCA Software Pty. Ltd. (the TSI Australian Affiliate): QDUMP, ADAREORG, ADASTRIP, and DBAUDIT. These products had formerly been marketed and supported by Computer Associates (formerly Legent, formerly Goal Systems International, formerly DBUG). TSI is also marketing and supporting two new CCA products, ADAMAGIC for UNIX and ADAREORG for UNIX. To learn more about these products, see the article elsewhere in this issue. To find out about TSI's special introductory offer for the products, call today!
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Treehouse Software is pleased to announce the release of LumeNAT V1.1.0, a performance monitor for NATURAL. LumeNAT shows performance data from the "NATURAL point of view," making it a perfect complement to TRIM. LumeNAT also highlights performance problems in Production environments which may not have surfaced during Quality Assurance testing performed with PROFILER. LumeNAT is already in use at a few selected sites in North America. LumeNAT is described in the LumeNAT Fact Sheet and in the article elsewhere in this issue.
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Recent issues of TREETIPS have discussed our ADABAS-to-RDBMS data migration software, tRelational (pronounced "tree-lay-shun-ul"), and our data propagation product, DPS.
tRelational is now available as a stand-alone product. It helps sites analyze ADABAS data structures and usage, then transforms and migrates the ADABAS data into a relational database (RDBMS) such as Oracle, Sybase, DB2, etc. tRelational is discussed in an article elsewhere in this issue.
Although tRelational development was a major undertaking, DPS is a quantum leap beyond tRelational. Not only does DPS help get today's ADABAS data into an RDBMS, it will also help keep the two data stores synchronized by propagating ADABAS data changes to the RDBMS data. Propagation is not as simple as extracting changes from an update log (PLOG) and reformatting them (and even that is not an easy task). To learn more about DPS, how it might benefit your site, and how you can get involved in testing, see the article elsewhere in this issue.
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You will soon be able to purchase these three products from TSI. To learn more about them, see the margin articles in this issue.
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Treehouse Software Advertises its Wares
All of the new products TSI has acquired have led to a change in our marketing. For example, you might have seen TSI's advertisement for DELPHI, DELPHI for Windows, tRelational, and DPS in the January 1996 issue of Oracle Informant. You might have seen our SEDIT and S/REXX ads in Linux Journal or Enterprise Systems Journal, or the SEDIT and S/REXX announcement in Technical Support magazine. An upcoming issue of Oracle Technical Journal will include an ad for DELPHI and DELPHI for Windows.
SEDIT and S/REXX may be reviewed in Linux Journal in the near future. Be sure to keep an eye out for the review, which we are confident will be very positive.
Affiliates Visit Treehouse Software
Karl Habres of CCA Software in Australia, Wendy Daubney of Bull Technology Services in South Africa, Jose Gonzalez de Cossio of Casa de Software in Mexico, and Eric Stannard of Blenheim Software in the U.K. visited TSI recently. These affiliates received training in DELPHI, DELPHI for Windows, tRelational, DPS, and the other TSI products. All of them indicated that they found the training useful and that it would help them better serve their customers.
The Oracle User Community Gets to Know Treehouse Software
TSI continues to be an active participant in Oracle user groups in our region, and continues to attend national and international Oracle meetings. Terry Divelbliss of TSI presented DELPHI at the Oracle MVS SIG meeting in California in March.
As a way to draw more attention to DELPHI and DELPHI for Windows, TSI announced a drawing for a free Apple Newton MessagePad 120 Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) in the recent ORACLE MVS mailing. We'll be announcing the winner soon.
We'll Let George Do It - Again!
A mailing was sent to many North American ADABAS/NATURAL users, explaining that we were willing to work with them to help them get a fantastic deal on N2O. All they needed to do was call George Szakach, TSI's President, and tell him why they wanted N2O. In return, he was willing to give them the product at a substantial discount. ("Actually," he says, "I was planning to give it away FREE if anyone asked.") Amazingly, the response was not as great as you might imagine.
As George put it, "So many times we've heard customers tell us how they believe N2O is vastly superior to the competition, but that they were going to have to go with a competitor because the price was so low (often zero). I wanted to give these sites a chance to get the better product at the best price I could offer: $0! I am surprised that my phone didn't ring off the hook."
If price really is an issue at your site, George has offered to do it one more time. Mark your calendar to call George on Friday, May 3, 1996, between 9:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. EDT. When you call, explain why you need to get a TSI product at a good price, and you may get a FANTASTIC deal! This offer is limited to North American sites and to the TSI products for which competitive products are often given away: N2O, SECURITRE, TRIM, and AUDITRE.
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One SEDIT user recently told us, "The people who have worked with SEDIT at our site are very impressed. There are some die-hard vi users here, but the rest of us do not want to struggle with it. SEDIT and S/REXX look like they were developed as one package because they are so well integrated with each other. We were very impressed with SEDIT, S/REXX, and Treehouse Software's support even before we bought it. Most UNIX vendors won't even give you good support after you buy their product."
According to Gilles Pardon of Euramark S.A., the international marketing representative for the SEDIT and S/REXX developers, 1995 was a great year for SEDIT sales. Total revenue increased 24% over 1994. SEDIT and S/REXX are now being used by many of the Fortune 500 companies. Some 1995 references include: Ericsson, Polygram, Caterpillar, IBM, and Philips Petroleum. A significant development effort took place in 1995, including the addition of support for several new platforms, including SCO, Solaris X86, Unixware, Siemens SINIX, Linux, and DEC Alpha.
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TSI was recently selected by CCA Software Pty. Ltd. of Australia to market and support their products in North America. You may already know of some of them:
ADAREORG reorganizes the physical structure of an ADABAS file. It allows DBAs to respond to changing requirements by inserting and deleting fields, normalizing PEs and MUs, etc. It assists in tuning efforts by helping reorganize files. For example, by moving the most frequently accessed fields to the start of the physical record, ADABAS field decompression overhead is minimized. ADAREORG supports ADABAS C V5.1, V5.2, and V5.3 on MVS, VSE, and UNIX.
ADASTRIP provides fast, efficient extraction of ADABAS data from backups and directly from databases. ADASTRIP is suitable for recovering historical data from old backup tapes, creating test data, extracting subsets of data for deferred processing, removing historical data from the database, exporting data to another database, and more. It can reduce ADABAS load by allowing processing to be performed on extracted data, eliminating the overhead associated with accessing ADABAS. By extracting a copy of the data from a backup, effectively "freezing" the image of the database at a point in time, ADASTRIP facilitates analysis which requires static data. ADASTRIP supports ADABAS C V5.1, V5.2, and V5.3 on MVS.
ADAMAGIC is a UNIX utility which migrates ADABAS C data from MVS to UNIX. It uses an ADABAS MVS backup dataset to load ADABAS C databases on UNIX. It can create test data for use with the UNIX ADABCK function, and create DVT, FDU, and DTA files from an ADABCK backup.
DBAUDIT verifies the logical integrity of an ADABAS database. It reads an ADABAS backup and, based on user-supplied verification criteria, reports integrity violations (such as missing master records where dependent records exist). DBAUDIT includes a simple but powerful SQL-like command language which is used to specify verification rules without the need to write programs. DBAUDIT supports ADABAS C V5.1, V5.2, and V5.3 on MVS.
QDUMP is an incremental backup utility for ADABAS. As ADABAS processes commands, QDUMP records information about the data changes in an internal table, tracking which parts of a database need to be backed up. When a backup is requested, QDUMP backs up only those database blocks which have changed since the last full backup. It provides status reports and on-line displays of its activity. Users have noted that compared to a typical ADASAV backup of a 10GB database, which can take 2.5 hours to complete and require 25 cartridges to store the data, a QDUMP incremental backup takes only 7 minutes to complete and fits on a single cartridge. This time savings leaves more time to run batch jobs, reduces tape storage requirements, and lowers backup costs, without sacrificing recoverability of the site's data. QDUMP supports ADABAS C V5.1, V5.2, and V5.3 on MVS.
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BUPA, the Leader in Independent Health Care in Great Britain, recently thought they had a major unbudgeted cost on their hands when new security rules signaled a MIP runaway!
Benchmark tests implementing new standard centralized ADABAS/ACF2 security methods indicated that the resource hike could trigger a costly CPU upgrade.
This is where SECURITRE came to the rescue, allowing BUPA to fully integrate and centralize their ADABAS and NATURAL security procedures into ACF2 without any noticeable addition to overhead!
Brian McCracken, the Technical Support Manager at BUPA, told us: "It looked as if it would be a case of 'Pay-up-and-look-big' until the SECURITRE flyer landed on my desk. I was skeptical at first, but when the new statistics came out, I was delighted that the SECURITRE architectural approach produced so little overhead."
"On top of the CPU upgrade savings," McCracken said, "we have plugged a potential security loophole, and are now looking at moving more of our NATURAL and Utility security under the same umbrella to avoid tedious administration time and effort."
If getting your ADABAS and NATURAL environments secured means budgeting for a new CPU, it's time to take a look at SECURITRE.
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Sites need to get production data closer to end users who want to perform queries and analysis using popular point-and-click GUI tools. However, granting widespread access to production data could interfere with routine business data processing or introduce undesirable security risks or overhead.
The question for sites is how to maintain high-performance mainframe production systems in ADABAS C, but make the same data accessible to users via relational databases and/or data warehouses. Users can then access the data using their favorite tools without impacting production systems.
DPS (Data Propagation System) provides the answer. Sites continue using ADABAS-based mainframe systems without change. DPS extracts the current ADABAS data, transforms it into a relational form, and places it in a relational database management system (RDBMS) where it may be analyzed using popular GUI tools.
As changes are made to the ADABAS data, DPS will:
End users will work with a replica, or copy, of production data, rather than the production data itself. Thus, their actions will not affect production systems.
Is DPS New Technology?
Yes, DPS is new technology. However, at its heart is proven code taken from reliable Treehouse Software products. It borrows from tRelational, TSI's ADABAS-to-RDBMS analysis, mapping, transformation, and migration technology. tRelational borrows from TRIM, TSI's ADABAS performance monitor and log analysis tool. DPS also borrows proven update-extraction code from AUDITRE, TSI's ADABAS auditing tool. This reliable code base is the heart of DPS, but represents only a fraction of DPS capabilities. DPS results from a major development effort, involving a large team of full-time developers and others.
An Open Solution
DPS is an open solution, designed to support all popular RDBMS products. DPS Version 1.0 supports Oracle and Sybase. Support for other RDBMS products will be implemented based on market need. DPS is also designed to interface with other replication tools, such as those offered by Sybase, Oracle, and Praxis International.
DPS Version 1.0 Status
DPS Version 1.0 has four main components: Log Extract, Duplicate Change Scan, Log Transformation Routine, and tRelational. Log Extract reads an ADABAS Protection Log dataset and extracts relevant updates. Duplicate Change Scan identifies multiple updates to the same ADABAS record and condenses them into a single update, reducing data propagation volume and network traffic. Log Transformation Routine maps the updates to the RDBMS tables and transforms them into a relational format. tRelational supplies parameters and mapping data for the other components. tRelational, Log Extract, and Duplicate Change Scan are available for alpha testing. The Log Transformation Routine is in development and should enter alpha testing before the end of the second quarter of 1996.
Contact Roy Parkinson at TSI Today!
Treehouse Software is looking for customers who are willing to test these modules and help guide the evolution of DPS/tRelational. Substantial incentives will be offered to test sites in exchange for their assistance.
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One PROFILER site told us that they produce a list of "CPU pigs." NATURAL programs which seem to have performance problems. These NATURAL pigs are then taken to the "PROFILER Fat Farm" for a little "physical training." They come out of it leaner and running faster than before.
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As discussed in the Fact Sheet provided with this newsletter, Treehouse Software is pleased to announce the availability of LumeNAT Version 1.1.0. The name "LumeNAT" is derived from the Latin word "lumen," which means "eye." LumeNAT, then, is an "eye-on-NATURAL" performance monitor. LumeNAT watches over the actions of individual NATURAL users and provides many Summary and Detail reports showing the performance of the NATURAL applications being executed.
One LumeNAT report is the Program Nest Report. The Program Nest Report makes it easy to see the flow of execution for an application's objects. It identifies the programs, external subroutines, and maps that are called during a user's execution of the application. The relationships between these components are displayed in a nested format. Uses for this report include:
An example of the Program Nest Report appears below:
Based on this example, it is easy to see the programs executed by this user, and the order in which they were executed. The report shows information about the structure of the application, and provides some indication of the performance characteristics of the code.
LumeNAT keeps statistics on terminal I/Os, execution time, and ADABAS calls by library, program, and user, displaying this information on a variety of Summary and Detail reports. Using these reports, it is possible to examine an application's performance from a number of viewpoints and determine the cause of any performance problems observed.
For More Information
The report shown on this page is only one of the many reports offered by LumeNAT. To discover the benefits of LumeNAT, visit the TSI Web site, or call TSI today to request a free 30-day trial.
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Some new faces have appeared at TSI since our last newsletter in November. They belong to Dave Denbow, Dan Acheff, Mindy Sawyer, Ken Deems, Anita Cooke, and Tim Ray.
Dave, Dan, and Mindy joined Keith Hoback on the tRelational/DPS development team, headed by Roy Parkinson.
Ken is helping to develop several TSI products, such as TRIM, AUDITRE, SECURITRE, and PROFILER.
Anita is assisting in the development of TSI's NATURAL-based products such as N2O.
Tim assists with our sales and marketing efforts.
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TSI and World Quality Systems have agreed in principle that TSI will market the WQS product, RACE.
RACE software sits between ADABAS and NATURAL and optimizes the ADABAS calls made by NATURAL. RACE eliminates unnecessary ADABAS calls made from NATURAL applications. Savings as high as 50% of the combined CPU time used by ADABAS and NATURAL can be achieved. RACE performs this optimization without requiring changes to a site's NATURAL code. A RACE monitor is available at no cost to determine the savings RACE will bring to your environment and applications.
Watch TREETIPS and the TSI Web site for more information.
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TSI and Info-Tech-Cs have agreed in principle that TSI will market the Info-Tech-Cs product, RestNat.
RestNat is a set of PC-based tools which analyze NATURAL code. RestNat graphically depicts system design and program architecture, displays application size and structure details, calculates a number of software metrics, and more.
You can download RestNat directly from the Info-Tech-Cs Web site at:
http://brno.ics.muni.cz/smidek/infotech/it-home.htm
Watch TREETIPS and the TSI Web site for more information.
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TSI and Blenheim Software have agreed in principle that TSI will market the Blenheim product, PEEK.
PEEK, an ADABAS file browser, allows authorized users to view (and optionally modify) the contents of any ADABAS file without the need to write an ad hoc program.
Watch TREETIPS and the TSI Web site for more information.
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Recent issues of TREETIPS have described tRelational, Treehouse Software's ADABAS-to-RDBMS data transformation offering. Customers have asked us to make tRelational available as a software product with optional consulting, and TSI has responded.
tRelational developers made numerous enhancements to tRelational in order to bring it to a "product" status. This included the development of more on-line help for the user, implementation of batch submission capabilities, a Direct Command line, and support for the Data Propagation System (DPS, discussed elsewhere in this issue). Many of the original tRelational screens were modified to be more user-friendly. A reference manual was written to accompany the software.
tRelational is also of benefit to ADABAS sites with no data migration plans. The tRelational ADABAS analysis features can assist ADABAS sites in keeping their systems running at peak efficiency. When used for "ADABAS-only" work, tRelational pricing is reduced accordingly. Many people who see tRelational demonstrated say, "Wow! We could use this right now. It would help us tune ADABAS and get our ADABAS and PREDICT environments in synch!"
tRelational is offered with optional on-site training and assistance to ensure that sites can put the software to use quickly and effectively.
Additional tRelational reference sites are needed. Reference sites will receive special pricing in exchange for their assistance. To receive more information about tRelational (such as a tRelational Fact Sheet or Overview), to request an on-site presentation and demonstration, or to purchase tRelational, contact Roy Parkinson at TSI today.
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The year 2000 will create profound challenges for data processing professionals. The problem is simple, software written with two-digit year fields is defective and will fail with the turn of the century. These failures will cause incorrectly sorted dates, inaccurate calculations and corrupted data. Due to the pervasive nature of these defects corrective action is required now! In fact, applications relying on future dates may already be affected. This article outlines the essential components of an effective year 2000 solution for NATURAL as implemented within NXL2000
The essential components of a year 2000 solution are impact analysis and remediation. Impact analysis involves identifying the affected source code and thereby determining the extent of the problem. To identify the affected code, the source must be scanned with manual or automated processes. One objective of source scanning is to efficiently identify date fields while producing a low level of both false positives and false negatives. False positives occur when a scanner locates VALIDATE or LIQUIDATE, while searching for the field name "DATE". False negatives occur when actual dates are not identified. Avoiding false negatives is essential because unidentified date fields will not be fixed.
Many impact analysis tools use basic text scanning techniques based solely on field naming conventions. These tools are subject to high false positive and false negative rates. Highly accurate results are obtained by combining comprehensive parsing of the source code with semantic analysis.
Within NXL2000, impact analysis begins by examining field names, types and usage. Analysis rules identify date fields not only by naming conventions (e.g. "DATE"), but also by typical date representation formats (e.g. N6 or A6) and by their usage (e.g. edited with the date style edit mask "YY/MM/DD"). Each rule has a certainty factor attached to it, indicating the estimated certainty that a match indicates an actual date field. This allows the combination of various pieces of name, type and usage evidence into an overall judgment of the likelihood that a field contains date values. Semantic analysis tools are then used to trace the flow of identified date fields both within individual programs and throughout the application.
Together, these techniques of comprehensive parsing and semantic analysis allow NXL2000 to provide an extremely low false negative rate while still maintaining an acceptable rate of false positives. For a date field to slip through this analysis it would have to have: a deceptive name, an unusual format, no date-style usage, and no contact directly or indirectly with any other date fields.
Remediation involves repairing the source code and/or database so that it will operate correctly after the year 2000. Ideally, this should be an automated task. NXL2000 remediation is based on the use of pattern matching rules to examine the semantic representation of an application for recognizable structural patterns. Strategies for resolving the identified defects (e.g. the procedural fix versus the data fix) are then implemented using transformational programming techniques. In cases where the code is too complex to fix automatically, defects are flagged, leaving a small amount of manual remediation.
By leveraging re-engineering experience and tools, Formal Systems has created an effective solution to the Year 2000 problem for NATURAL. Incorporating comprehensive parser technology, NXL2000 provides robust impact analysis with outstanding coverage rates and remediation tools that will produce low residual manual editing. For more information, contact us at:
FORMAL SYSTEMS INC.
1149 Smythe Street, Suite 11
Fredericton, NB
Canada E3B 3H4
1-800-249-2222 / 506-452-8467
Fax: 506-453-9828
Internet: Inquiry@FormalSys.CA
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Disclaimer: All product names mentioned in TREETIPS are trademarks and/or products of their respective holders. The mention of any non-TSI product in TREETIPS should not be considered to imply support or endorsement by Treehouse Software, Inc., its employees, or affiliates.
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