HP is releasing a bundled enhancement for the HP 3000 that proves a well known tenet of computing -- software improvements yield quantum performance leaps compared to those derived from hardware and chip advances.
The enhancement is known as b-tree indexes, a powerful addition to the TurboIMAGE and IMAGE/SQL databases that beta testers report delivers search results up to 100 times faster than databases without such indexing. One customer reported that a search of a database that took 20 minutes to deliver results without b-trees now finishes in 2 seconds.
Perhaps most important to HP 3000 customers, the enhancement will work with QUERY, the most widely used report program for HP 3000s. HP's engineers in the Roseville software labs were able to squeeze in a new version of QUERY that supports the b-trees -- in part because testing of the Express 3 release took longer than HP had first estimated. QUERY got resubmitted on a rebuild of the operating system, according to Software Services and Technology engineer James Overman.
HP has been working on implementing b-trees in TurboIMAGE since 1995, and customers will have to wait just a bit longer to enjoy their benefits. Initial plans to have Express 3 ready to ship before HP World changed as testing took place, and now HP says it will have an Express tape ready to ship in the second half of September. The release will also include the long-anticipated ODBC driver for 32-bit clients.
QUERY, while never intended to be a production-level software tool by HP, has become one in many HP 3000 shops by default, since the program is included with every HP 3000 shipped. HP's engineers report the new version not only produces faster searches, but that b-tree items automatically come back in sorted order. That means any business processes that use QUERY and b-tree indexes will deliver results even faster than the 100-times increase -- because a separate SORT process won't be needed for many operations. QUERY also does NOT matches in the new version on Express 3 -- an enhancement HP will also make available through a patch to MPE/iX 5.0 QUERY customers.