The design is known at the IMAGE ENCHILADA enhancement, born of a December SIGIMAGE Executive Committee (SIEC) meeting at the New Mexico home of committee member Wirt Atmar. ENCHILADA stands for ENhancement for caCHIng Limited Authorized DAta, a facility that could gives IMAGE users a brand new way to store extra information about the database.

This kind of information is invaluable to application programmers and development teams. If an Enchilada design can be approved by the SIGIMAGE group that is simple yet powerful, HP could build it — and use it to deliver many IMAGE enhancements it hasn’t yet committed resources toward.

The meeting to discuss the project takes place this month in the prelude to the Interex IPROF programmer’s forum, held in Sunnyvale, Calif. More than 30 programmers and SIEC members will have an all-day “A Better IMAGE for the Next Millennium” seminar on Feb. 17 in a hotel across the street from HP’s California database labs.

HP has not made any commitments to creating such the fundamental enhancement, according to SIEC chairman Ken Sletten. “HP has not committed to implementing the Enchilada,” Sletten said. “But HP has not discouraged continued discussion, either.”

Engineering resources at the HP database labs, like most of the HP 3000 division, are stretched tight this year as the group prepares for IA-64 and PA-8500 HP 3000s on the way. The new hardware demands a high investment in software improvements, leaving productivity enhancements like those in the SIGIMAGE ballot at a standstill in many cases. Even a hiring pace at CSY that outstrips most of HP hasn’t eased the burden of revising HP 3000 software.

SIGIMAGE members believe the Enchilada, if planned well, could deliver improvements that most developers could enjoy. This enhancement is a way for IMAGE to store “extra” information about the database, the datasets, the items and the individual fields. IMAGE stores information in the root file such as the number of datasets, the number of items, the dataset capacities and item datatypes.

IMAGE experts meeting in California are proposing that additional information be stored somewhere that can be retrieved later by applications and tools that might be interested in that information. Each piece of information would have a “tag” associated with it, to identify what type of information it is. The piece would be associated with the database as a whole, an individual dataset, an individual item, or a specific instance of an item in a dataset or a field.

Developers say the Enchilada could be used to deliver DATE/TIME datatypes for IMAGE, an enhancement that has been near the top of requests for several years. Rather than add new datatypes for the various date formats, a tag could be added that indicates which HPDATE date format is stored in that field. The data portion would contain something like “D23.” Programs which wish to intelligently display some or all of the various date formats would request this tag deal with it appropriately.

The Enchilada could also be applied as a solution to the outstanding Z/Z+/P/P+ IMAGE/SQL problem, which determines whether or not a “P” or “Z” type field should be signed. This design deficiency can abort applications that are unaware of IMAGE’s penchant to leave these fields unsigned. This signing can also be stored in a tag, and IMAGE/SQL could be made to use this data field.

Developers also identified as potential Enchilada uses IMAGE/SQL split information, tags for handling items with NULL values, tags for individual database tool vendors to leave notes inside databases about history and audit trails, and tags to let database administrators add their own information to a database.

“The nice thing about this feature is its extensibility,” said SIEC member Steve Cooper in a manifesto on the Web that describes the enhancement’s potential (Browse to it at www.allegro.com/SIGIMAGE/enchilada.html). Developers in the committee liken the meeting to one that took place at the beginning of the 1990s in Reno, where then-IMAGE Lab chief Jim Sartain took notes from users on how to make IMAGE a viable tool in an SQL-embracing world.