It may be a pipe dream, but the Special Interest Group for IMAGE is running the flag up that pipe with some extensive proposals about the future of IMAGE/SQL design. SIGIMAGE has sent its 1997 ballot to members to gather information about what HP 3000 customers want in future versions of the workhorse database that's powering more than three-fourths of HP 3000s. The top two items could change the database's SQL access in a profound way.
SIGIMAGE is proposing that HP redesign its SQL interface to IMAGE, an alternative that could eliminate the need to use the SQL services provided by ALLBASE/SQL. The top-listed ballot proposal calls for 16- and 32-bit ODBC access "directly to TurboIMAGE, without having to go through Allbase/SQL."
The proposal listed second also advocates an alternative to the Allbase access. This ballot item calls for the same 16- and 32-bit ODBC client access, this time directly to MPE and KSAM files. (See sidebar, "How to cast your vote," for details on how to vote.)
The proposals spring from the complexity of managing TurboIMAGE databases after they have been enabled for SQL access under the current design. Regardless of how often HP and others have given instruction on using IMAGE/SQL, it simply isn't understood completely by much of the customer base. In recent discussions of the SIGCOBOL user group, customers testified to the piecemeal nature of the current IMAGE/SQL implementation.
"It doesn't look and feel like a single product," said Mark Undrill of Affirm Ltd. in the UK. "If you want to change the IMAGE side then you have to detach from the Allbase side, make the changes and reattach. If you had made changes on the Allbase side then these are lost unless you've kept script files to re-run. It just doesn't feel right."
No other HP 3000 expert has spent more time on educating the customer base of the potential of IMAGE/SQL than Denys Beauchamin of HIComp. A member of the SIGIMAGE executive committee, Beauchamin has traveled around the world during the first three years of IMAGE/SQL release to lead tutorials on its use. But even Beauchamin recently threw in the towel on the product, asking HP in the latest SIGIMAGE newsletter to abandon the Allbase component.
"Many, if not most of the companies who participated in the IMAGE/SQL upgrade program still have not started to use the SQL portion of IMAGE," Beauchamin reported in the newsletter. "There are many reasons for this state of affairs, but chief among them is, in one word, Allbase/SQL."
Beauchamin, who's probably spent more time with IMAGE/SQL than anyone but its designers, says using the Allbase/SQL engine to give TurboIMAGE read and write access to SQL databases served HP's needs to best manage resources and support. "But to a user, it is too complicated," he said. "In order to provide SQL access to IMAGE, one has to go through several gyrations and hoops, some of them flaming."
Beauchamin cites the relative complexity of Allbase versus the elegant design of IMAGE; the difficulty of creating database environments (DBEs); problems attaching databases across groups and accounts; and additional backup steps to ensure that Allbase DBEs are backed up on the same cycle as the TurboIMAGE database. He also notes that copying and making structural changes to TurboIMAGE databases that have DBEs demands detaching and re-attaching those databases.
If HP were to drop the need Allbase/SQL engine and provide direct ODBC access for TurboIMAGE, "we would then see a whole lot more sites take advantage of IMAGE/SQL and turn the HP 3000 into a server."
Ever since IMAGE/SQL was first released, customers and database experts have been asking HP to simplify the database administrator's tasks while using the product. Fred White of Adager, a supplier of IMAGE adapter/manager products since the late 1970s, said that it appears HP has lost track of the enhancement requests that were filed several years ago on the product.
HP, White said "went though all our notes and turned them into enhancement requests, and then they got thrown into the enhancement request black hole. I told them they should do it all over again. I told them this time do it not just so SQL could access the database, but so the databases could be administered."
White, like others who have witnessed the evolution of the HP 3000 database strategy, views the current IMAGE/SQL design as one that was engineered to get customers familiar with Allbase as its primary objective.
"The HP lab looked upon IMAGE/SQL as a way of dragging Allbase kicking and screaming into the successful side of the ledger -- a way to get people to use Allbase," White said.
Not every TurboIMAGE user reviles the Allbase engine. Some think that the IMAGE database design couldn't support an SQL implementation without some outside engine, and see Allbase/SQL as the best possible choice.
"The current IMAGE/SQL, despite its faults, is quite miraculous," said SIGNETWORKING chair Jeff Kell during the SIGCOBOL discussion. "The weak point is ODBC, particularly 32-bit client. If making IMAGE/SQL more cohesive means better support of IMAGE-like access via ODBC, I agree 100 percent, and this is a realistic goal. If it means 'robust implementation of SQL,' I don't think this is realistic with an IMAGE foundation."
The problem has come to the fore now that HP is readying the release of a new generation of IMAGE/SQL ODBC access. ODBCLink/SE will bring the long awaited 32-bit client access to TurboIMAGE databases, but only through the support of Allbase/SQL. Allbase/SQL isn't required when accessing TurboIMAGE with the full ODBCLink product from M.B. Foster Associates. And customers like Beauchamin are wondering why HP didn't license the full product and eliminate the administrative snarls.
HP is listening to the debate, and R&D manager Jon Bale of the database lab says that no request is too ambitious to dismiss outright. Bale said that the answer to the problem may not lie in abandoning Allbase/SQL, but in making the administration simpler.
"The SIG certainly can identify whatever enhancements they'd like to request," Bale said, "and we're not in any position to say 'that's a stupid request.' It's always better if you can express your need and let us think about various solutions. If difficulty of administration is a problem, maybe making administration easier would be just as good a solution as something else."
Whatever the solution, HP clearly needs to simplify ODBC access for many of its customers. Robert Meissner, an officer of the NECRUG regional user group, reported that several attempts over the years to use IMAGE/SQL have been blocked by the complexity of the package.
"I started using the AllBase/ODBC gateway several times over the last three or four years, only to run out of energy to finish the project," he said "Every time I turned around it broke. Either a new version of Windows came along, or a socket got misplaced. HP 3000 users want and need reliable, robust systems."