When it’s MPE/iX 6.0 Express 1. Allegro Consultants’ Gavin Scott reported this out on the Internet while reporting on the availability of HP’s JDBC, and whether it will work on MPE/iX 5.5. “There seems to have been a glitch in the distribution of MPE/iX 6.0 Express 1,” Scott said. “It was supposed to contain the official version of JDBC. It appears that JDBC went onto the SUBSYS tape, but nobody got a SUBSYS tape with the Express 1 PowerPatch tape.

Even though HP considers JDBC to be free, it also considers JDBC to be a component of Allbase/SQL or IMAGE/SQL. JDBC is thus available only to customers with a current support contract for either Allbase or IMAGE/SQL. One of the rationales for this is to ensure people are using JDBC with the correct version of Allbase or IMAGE/SQL, thus supposedly cutting down on support calls. You can request a PowerPatch tape from HP’s Response Center (RC). However, as with any request for a SUBSYS tape, you have to go through Contracts Administration and not the RC to receive a SUBSYS tape with JDBC. Of course, in order to get to the RC, you have to have a contract..

By the way, as far as using JDBC, once you get it, Scott speculated it would probably work on 5.5, though he pointed out that it would of course be unsupported. To which HP’s Lars Appel added: “I confess, I have used the HP JDBC driver from MPE/iX 6.0 Express 1 on MPE/iX 5.5 systems. It worked fine for the program, applet, and servlets examples on my Web page at the EditCorp site. Not supported by HP, but there is a good chance it will work for you.”

— John Burke, net.digest editor

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