MatchPoint streamlines e3000 replication gateway

Incremental updates put IMAGE data quickly into DSS databases

Packaged applications for HP 3000 sites try to deliver reports for most needs, but business analysis requirements often surpass such fixed reporting. A new solution from a report tool maker hopes to fill the gap through replication, putting incremental IMAGE data onto servers that supplement the HP e3000.

Vital Soft (www.vital-soft.com, 800.848.2576) is introducing the MatchPoint Replication Suite, software that’s installed on both the HP e3000 and a target system running SQL Server. While replication isn’t completely new for the 3000, doing replication in increments is one of the key novelties of the MatchPoint solution. This novelty is driven by the IMAGE/SQL power of logging, a tested technology that’s overcoming its reputation.

In the field, the software can help customers like First Community Health Plan, a San Antonio HMO which runs the Amisys/3000 healthcare application. IT manager Steven Bishop said reports included with the Amisys package didn’t come close to meeting the HMO’s analysis needs. He wanted decision support, and looked beyond his production server.

“The demand on the HP 3000 is pretty high, and we use it as our primary transaction processor,” he said. “We wanted to learn about products we might get better reporting from.” Bishop said many of the Amisys customers he’s talked with need more of a Decision Support System (DSS) than the application provides.

“Like most canned systems, as far as decision support it’s extremely poor,” he said. “The core features to run your day-to-day business are fine. As far as trending and looking at changes over time… most everybody’s buying a data warehouse product, or building their own.”

Data warehousing is a project with a long learning curve, however, something Bishop wants to avoid. “We attempted to build our own, but you can spend your life working on just that,” he said. “Management changes their idea, and then you have to go back and rethink everything.” Staying within budget is difficult in classic data warehousing, he explained, as analysis needs from top management continue to shift.

Replication puts the 3000’s data onto other resources, typically NT servers whose cost is lower. Managers trade off reliability for cheaper flexibility in manipulating data. “I personally wouldn’t want to put my enterprise on NT, or anything from Microsoft, but there’s a number of solutions out there built on SQL Server,” Bishop said.

If hardware and software costs are lower on NT platforms serving 3000 production systems through replication, there’s one steep cost of such replication: time to load large datasets on the non-3000 server. This is where the logging backbone of MatchPoint goes to work.

MatchPoint’s design uses the 3000’s database logging capabilities to shorten the load times. Logging once had a reputation as a process with significant overhead, but it’s less invasive than trapping database calls, according to Vital Soft’s John Overton.

“There have been problems with system failures caused by software not performing properly when it traps at the system level,” he said. “We don’t want our software to crash a production system, so we chose to use log files.” Using the log files also guarantees all data will be replicated, since HP guarantees a lost database can be reconstructed from log files.

After an initial load of the 3000’s data to the SQL Server machine, the product uses the log files to do incremental replication. At First Community, the HMO was looking at transaction dates of datasets to determine what to extract, an indicator that isn’t completely reliable.

Tests of the HMO’s health, accounting and option databases with MatchPoint this summer showed that “mapping the IMAGE structure to SQL Server worked great,” Bishop said. “We just moved them all over to SQL, and I started running SQL queries against the new structure, and they were very fast. It was something we could build a reporting system off of.”

It’s not coincidental that MatchPoint would come from a company that has been delivering a reporting solution, Visimage, to HP 3000 customers for more than a decade. Vital Soft’s Overton said the company considers the e3000 an important resource, but thinks reporting deserves its own server.

“We sell a report writer on the 3000, and for some clients that’s a good product,” Overton said. “We built MatchPoint because for some clients, the 3000 is not where they should be doing their report writing.”

“The 3000 is an outstanding platform for stable application development,” Overton added. “In a move to deliver more data to users, particularly with large databases, we’ve put the 3000 under a lot of additional pressure to deliver additional resources — resources that often aren’t available.”

Administrators at HP 3000 sites want to remain responsible for reporting, even if it doesn’t come directly from an e3000 system. MatchPoint integrates the 3000 with the reporting server, putting the administrative power of the 3000 in charge of the replication process.

“There’s a lot of organizations where the decision support group would love to have the SQL Server database, but they don’t understand the 3000,” Overton said. “There’s sometimes a bit of tension between those groups. With MatchPoint, the 3000 administrator can deliver the data which the decision support group needs, totally under his control. Both groups are happy, because they have the data they need, and the administrator has the control he needs.”

At First Community, the HMO is already integrating data from non-3000 sources, so adding an NT server to the mix doesn’t complicate the solution in Bishop’s view. MatchPoint’s replication can provide an efficient gateway to a low-cost reporting server.

“I’m looking at it to enhance our use of the HP 3000,” Bishop said. “The kind of tools we’re using native on the 3000 end up slowing down our core function. We’re been moving data off anyway to external devices. Some companies have a second 3000 for running reporting on, but that would be a very expensive solution for us. We’re looking at the cheap method, which is Microsoft. The part that’s not cheap is still designing and producing the reports.”