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TimeShift finds, examines date fields to age contents for Year 2000

Developer Gordon Helm reports that the software was designed to automatically find and examine all date fields contained in a database, without user input or directions. “User inputs can then be used to refine the search process,” Helm explained. “The software determines the date format and the range of date values contained within each dataset’s date field.”

The product also reports the number of records found for each year encountered; the number of any unknown date values; and the location of the date field within a field in instances where date fields are concatenated within other fields. It works with fields which are blank, empty, or which contain “999999” or “000000.”

Time Shift 2000’s aging feature lets a database administrator or developer increment any IMAGE date field by a number of years. In field trials at the Insurance Service Center in Stockton, Calif., this meant that Mark Stensaas could add a few years to his date data and test Year 2000 development on his seven HP 3000s.

“I found it very easy to use,” Stensaas said of his experience beta testing the software on 1.5 million records of data. The software pulls a file from the HP 3000 and places it on a PC using WRQ’s Reflection, Stensaas said, “where a Visual Basic client lets you work with the target datasets after it inventories the data structure. I designated a date offset so I could simulate data fields. The only alternative I could see would be having to roll your own tool to find all these date fields and increment all the dates.”

Time Shift 2000 processes dates by their IMAGE field name, but also allows the user to exclude fields from particular sets. Therefore, if a field like TEMP-HOLD contains a date in one dataset but not in another, Time Shift 2000 can be directed to only update the field in the dataset containing the dates.

“This aging process becomes very useful in testing to verify processing results that should not be affected by time changes,” Helm said. “The results of a baseline test using today’s date and data should match the results of a test with the data ‘aged’ forward by some number of years,” Helm said, “assuming day of week and leap year validations are not performed and the system clock [is] set forward by this same number of years.”

This type of age testing can be performed incrementally until all the data has been aged into the 21st century, to verify the functionality of applications as they encounter year 2000 dates. The product ages test data dates by year increments on non-critical items, search and sort items in detail sets linked to automatic master data sets.

The company developed the tool to assist in its Year 2000 services, but the software is being sold without a required consulting component. G.R. Helm offers methodology selection and recommendation, data analysis, code analysis, software correction and testing among its Year 2000 compliance services. Time Shift 2000 is CPU tier priced, with pricing starting at under $1,000; a Series 918/947 license is $2,000 and Series 9x9 licenses start at $3,500. Multiple-CPU license discounts are available.