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June 2005

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Here Comes Suprtool 4.9

Suprtool provides fast access to your data on the HP e3000 and HP-UX. With Suprtool, you can perform many necessary DP functions easily, with just a few simple commands We are getting ready to release a production update to Suprtool, so we thought it would be good to review the changes. Suprtool users will receive version 4.9 on their regular anniversary date, but the changes are also available in a pre-release version 4.8.11.

The following improvements have been included in both the MPE Version 4.9 and the HP-UX Version 4.9:

$Clean Function and Clean Command

The $Clean function in Suprtool and Clean command in STExport now have the ability to replace a character to be cleaned with null or nothing. If you set the cleanchar as being:

Set Cleanchar “<null>” then Suprtool will remove the character specified in the clean command and effectively shift the text to the left and blank out the portion at the end.

$Number Function

The $number had a bug whereby it would add on two zeroes and or bad data if the input number did not have a decimal point. We have fixed the bug so that the number function no longer adds the two digits on the end in error.

However, some users worked around this issue by doing the following:

>extract target = $truncate($number(conv-field) / 100)

Since some users used this work around, the fix to the $number function will then return incorrect results. Therefore, we added the set numbug command to have Suprtool revert from the correct behaviour to continue to have the bug.

By default, Suprtool will just convert the number and not add on the data at the end, however, if you have used the work around then you can add the command >set numbug on to the script directly or globally in your suprmgr file.

The following enhancements only apply to Suprtool HP-UX:

Oracle Integers

Suprtool by default maps certain numeric fields into packed-decimal data types when they have more than one decimal place:

The new setting, Set Oracle Integer On, changes the Suprtool format from packed-decimal to Integer based on the size of the Number:

Output=input

Suprtool now supports the Output=input command, whereby Suprtool sorts a file onto itself. This is one of the last features of MPE Suprtool that was missing in HP-UX Suprtool. It allows you to sort a large file without requiring the disk space for both an input and output copy at the same time.

Oracle Dynamic Load

We have further revised the Oracle Dynamic Load to do the following:

1) Attempt to load libclntsh.sl using the dynamic path.

2) Attempt to load libclntsh.so using the dynamic path feature.

3) Manually load $ORACLE_HOME/lib32/libclntsh.sl

Suprtool now dynamically loads all of the Oracle routines that it needs at startup. This insures that Suprtool is using calls only for your version of Oracle and provides a more stable environment.

If Suprtool fails to load the Oracle library, you will see the message: Warning: Your Oracle library could not be loaded.

This means that any reference to Oracle calls will not function. If you do not have the Oracle option enabled in Suprtool you will not see the errors.

Eloquence Dynamic Load

Previously, Suprtool would attempt to load the Eloquence libraries and report an error message if the libraries were not loaded. This is no longer the default behaviour. Suprtool will try to load the libraries function, however Suprtool will not report an error by default. To check if your libraries were loaded you can run Suprtool with the -lw option: ./suprtool -lw

Oracle Connections

Due to recent patches and changes in Oracle Security, older versions of Suprtool could not connect to some Oracle databases. We have therefore re-written all of the code to connect to databases to use more up to date OCI functions.

By default, Suprtool will now use this new method of connecting. This version also improves the parsing of the open command, allowing for 30 characters each for the username, password and dbname.

This also allows for connection to databases on other servers.

>Open Oracle username/password@dbname

Set Oracle OpenFix On. Set Oracle OpenFix forces Suprtool to use the olog call, when connecting to Oracle databases. This option should no longer be necessary, now that the default is to use the new connection method.

Set Oracle OpenOld On Set Oracle OpenOld forces Suprtool to use the orlon call, when connecting to Oracle databases. This should only be used if connection to Oracle 7 databases.

Table Command

The Table command is now capable of reading files greater than 4Gb. The MPE version of Suprtool already does this.

Bugs Corrected in Suprtool 4.9

On HP-UX, Table was not releasing memory-mapped space properly. This may have been the cause behind a number of weird problems over the last couple of years.

Suprlink’s Join command would not build the output file large enough if the input file flimit was significantly smaller than the Link file. This was only on MPE, since there is not such thing as a file limit on HP-UX. For a complete list of problems corrected, go to www.robelle.com/products/whatsnew.html#Suprtool.