By Steve Cooper
SIGIMAGE Executive Committee

SIGIMAGE, the Special Interest Group for HP’s award-winning database management system IMAGE, held its semi-annual full day meeting during Database Day at this year’s SIG3000 conference. Once again, the group lived up to its reputation of delivering the epitome of excellent user-to-user and user-to-vendor communications.

After the opening remarks by SIGIMAGE Chairman Ken Sletten, the floor was turned over to Tien-You Chen, member of HP’s Database Lab and long-time SIGIMAGE liaison. Tien-You provided an update on both the IMAGE/SQL and the ALLBASE/SQL products. First, he discussed the IMAGE/SQL Date Mitigation project, code-named the Eggroll Project. This enhancement provides for the automatic mapping of several TurboIMAGE date formats into a standard SQL format, when accessed via the SQL interface.

In true SIGIMAGE fashion, Jeanette Nutsford raised an issue relating to the choice of a “LOW VALUES” date in this enhancement, as it relates to COBOL. A lively discussion ensued, and after a few minutes of debate, a consensus was reached and a recommendation for a change to the enhancement was formally suggested to HP. It was a classic example of the kind of instant advocacy that SIGIMAGE and HP’s Database Lab have made famous. In olden days, software would be released, users would find problems, they would submit enhancement requests to HP, and years later the problems would be fixed. With the semi-annual meetings, and HP’s openness and willingness to share designs with its users, this cycle has been reduced to minutes, resulting in software that is right the first time.

The Date Mitigation enhancement will be available for MPE/iX versions 5.5 and 6.0 in a limited distribution patch, bringing the IMAGESQL version to B.G2.18, and as a General Release patch to MPE/iX 6.5, bringing the IMAGESQL version to B.G3.01.

Tien-You next talked about HP’s efforts to loosen some of the TurboIMAGE limits that some customers are bumping into. Specifically, the maximum number of items per database will increase to 1,234, the maximum number of datasets per database will increase to 250, and the maximum number of paths out of a master dataset will increase to 64. Maximum dataset size is currently 40Gb, but will double to 80Gb in TurboIMAGE C.07.14.

Tien-You also explained that by TurboIMAGE c.09.xx, IMAGE will take advantage of MPE’s large files, and will have a maximum dataset size larger than 80Gb.

Another debate then raged around whether or not new DBINFO modes should be introduced, or the old ones changed to return more information than before. One member of the audience asked Tien-You what HP did in a similar situation when limits were raised between IMAGE and TurboIMAGE. Tien-You was quick to quip, “Beats me! I’m not THAT old.” Everyone laughed, but there was no denying that many in the room did remember those days. There may have been just over 50 people in the room, but they represented almost 1,000 years of IMAGE experience!

In the end, the audience voted to recommend to HP that no new DBINFO modes be added for this particular enhancement. Since this will simplify the project and reduce the amount of work HP has to do, the suggestion has a high likelihood of acceptance.

Lastly, Tien-You discussed the next steps to ensure that IMAGE continues to scale in performance on the new, larger and faster processors that are coming. Techniques include removing the use of a single semaphore per database for puts and deletes, thereby increasing the number of puts and deletes that can occur concurrently, and extending the highwater mark concept to eliminate contention for that resource.

It was clear after this presentation that HP’s commitment to IMAGE has never been stronger, and significant enhancements are still taking place at an amazing rate. What’s more, with 45 proposed enhancements on the current SIGIMAGE enhancement ballot, the lab is not likely to run out of things to do for a while, either.

The session included several other interesting topics, including Ken Paul exposing many cryptic IMAGE error messages, Birket Foster discussing SQL3 (aka SQL99), and Nick Demos giving an update on the Enchilada proposal, the ENhancement for caCHIng Limited Authorized DAta (See story, page 12).

In the afternoon, the group broke into two parallel sessions: SIGHPSQL (formerly known as SIGAllbase), chaired by Joe Geiser, and SIGOmnidex, chaired by Ken Nutsford.