Millennium Rx from Redstone Technologies (303.766.3222) provides what may be the only path to Year 2000 compliance for older applications on MPE/iX systems. The software also provides a safety valve for firms which can already see they won't meet the millennium deadline for every module of every their mission-critical application.
Help for IMAGE database fixes has been shipping since 1996 from Adager, and a wealth of tools for altering programs is available from Allegro Consulting, SolutionSoft, Robelle, Productive Software Systems and Diamond Optimum Systems. But all existing solutions for application repair require source code in order to make modifications. For some portion of the HP 3000 base, source code is long gone, as programs written in the 1980s continue to work long after backups of their source were lost.
Millennium Rx lets a system manager or application administrator designate a pivot year for an HP 3000's databases and datasets, automatically determining if a two digit year like 51 means 1951 or 2051. The software permits programs which use a two digit year code to continue functioning into the next century.
"The whole idea of staying with two digits isn't radical," said Redstone's Jerry Johnson. "It's a viable alternative to the resources required for large amounts of code conversion. And there are people that don't have access to source code."
The software uses a control file which serves all designated applications on a 3000. This XL file works for Compatibility Mode as well as Native Mode programs on MPE/iX systems, using switch stubs to move the SL work to the XL for Compatibility Mode programs.
System managers can also set JCWs for individual programs to vary pivot dates, or use a system-wide pivot date directly from the control file. The software doesn't work on the older MPE V Classic HP 3000s.
Millennium Rx "makes the way the database data appears to the user different than the way it exists in the database," Johnson said. For Year 2000, for example, the database stores 00 as A0, but displays 00 in applications.
Johnson, who worked with Adager's Alfredo Rego early in his HP 3000 career, said the idea for the product emerged from two consulting customer requests he received in the same month last year "where they wanted to stay with two digits." He acknowledges that the biggest problem with sticking to a two-digit solution is in sorting, because date fields are often sort items in IMAGE databases. Johnson combined the pivot year technology with a high-speed sorting engine which he had been selling, SortMagic, to produce a solution that should deliver faster results as well as behave accurately across the century mark. The sorts can be as much as 75 percent faster than the standard MPE/iX TurboSort in both CPU and wall times.
"My goal when I wrote SortMagic was to create the fastest sort product available on the HP 3000," Johnson said. Unfortunately, he added, "when people had performance problems in the past they just went to a bigger box."
That bonus of faster sorts is added on top of comprehensive date controls, Johnson said. That's because the product also lets companies convert some, but not all, of the date fields in their applications. Two-digit and four digit year fields can co-exist, accessing the same IMAGE data regardless of how the year values are stored within the applications. Millennium Rx will handle the sorting of the mixed field types. Johnson said this will permit companies to begin testing converted applications while unconverted applications continue to run against the same data.
Costs for Year 2000 conversions continue to mount while resources grow more scarce to do the work in the 25-plus months left before the turn of the century. Johnson said that Millennium Rx lets a company convert its most critical programs while avoiding the cost of converting every program in its enterprise.
The product includes a standalone sort utility to apply against applications written in and using COBOL, FORTRAN and other third generation languages as well as 4GLs like Cognos' Quiz, Speedware and report tools M.B. Foster's DataExpress and Idaho Computer Services' DataNow.
The software also ships with conversion routines to convert between data formats "a lot like some of the other utilities out there," Johnson said, for programmatic operations as well as comparison routines.
The product "catches data at a lower point rather than having to do something to all your programs," Johnson said. "This is an alternative that will work for a lot of people for many years."