Valley Forge's Symposium showed off a pair of database alternatives

April 2003

Valley Forge’s Symposium showed off a pair of database alternatives

Two companies were working the exhibit hallways of the latest Interex e3000 Solutions Symposium, offering information on a pair of alternatives to the ultimate expense of moving to Oracle for an SQL database. Pervasive Software (www.pervasive.com) was talking up its database Pervasive.SQL, which has grown out of years of engineering from a group that once sold the solution as PC-based Btrieve. We plan to look into this software alternative in more detail in a coming issue, since the Pervasive officials at the Symposium told us that an HP 3000 application ISV has moved its IMAGE-based app from the 3000 to the Pervasive database and Intel-based hardware.

Also breaking some ground in Valley Forge were database providers InterSystems (www.intersystems.com), introducing its Cache. The software is serving about 4 million seats around the world, working in 80,000 systems including Unix and NT server for about 1.200 customers. A 35-year-old company, InterSystems officials at the show said that if you look far enough back in the pedigree of Cache you can find engineering links to MUMPS, a programming language with an integrated database system that got popular in the 1980s with hospitals and healthcare organizations that needed fast string searching of databases. The company has recently completed a Cache project to outfit healthcare giant Kaiser Permanente with a production database, and its software drives the back end of the Ameritrade online securities Web site. Interbase is working with Neartek, one of the providers of tools for migration to HP 3000 sites and the HP Platinum migration partners.

You could even find competing hardware solutions in the Interex vendor area, an enterprising addition for the 3000 customers looking for a way to leave their platforms. We talked briefly with Unicon Conversion Technologies (www.uctnet.com), which converts HP 3000 applications for use on many kinds of systems. Standing beside the Unicon official was a rep from Unisys, offering an alternative to the HP hardware on the lips of so many Platinum migration partners during the conference. Unisys hardware is now deep into the Intel architectural roadmap, and it’s one of several landing spots for a conversion that Unicon wants to perform on COBOL applications. Platform alternatives to HP’s solutions were scarce at the last HP World expo hall, and we thought the expansion was a welcome addition for the sites that are bound to leave the well-known order of the 3000 community. An upcoming article in the NewsWire will include Symposium advice offered from the PIR Group, which moves HP 3000 COBOL to platforms that include IBM’s iSeries.

You can still make your own contact with these alternatives. or more traditional help for your HP 3000 installation, at this month’s West Coast edition of the Solutions Symposium. HP’s Jeff Vance, who’s giving a detailed lecture on the nuances of CI programming, wanted us to talk up Mark Bixby’s “Is Your Homestead Secure?” session, which is scheduled for Thursday, April 24. The conference runs from April 23-26, and registration is being held online at www.interex.org/conference/e3k03west.