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| Success Story |
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| Client: |
DataTech Software |
| Project: |
Legacy Migration: Wang Conversion |
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"Working with ACC, we put together a project plan to convert our system from Wang COBOL to
-Oracle. ACC finished the project on time and on budget. I think that says it all!!! "
Bob Glass
President, Datatech
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A Wang COBOL Migration for Datatech Software
This success story demonstrates ACC's ability to provide all necessary skills to deliver a most complex Wang Cobol conversion.
The ACC client, Datatech Software Corporation, is a software firm that licenses its product to a small community of multi-national advertising-public relations Corporations. The converted application is an off the shelf product developed by Datatech Software. Each Datatech client has unique requirements that are met by a very high level of parameterization of the product. The resulting system is functionally comprehensive and complex in its technical features. Its architecture relies on advanced software development technologies and on the usage of advanced WANG programming features.
The system consists of 1500 main programs using 15 private subroutine libraries (with the average of 50 routines in each, among them C-language routines). Total line count is 3.1M, of which 400K are "copy members". The system uses 700 logical data files, many of which exist and are accessed simultaneously in multiple physical instances. The size of some of the data files at larger Datatech clients exceeds 2GB. The average of client simultaneous users of the converted system is near 1,000.
As part of the project, job and print queuing were interfaced to third party products providing equivalent functionality to WANG's subsystems.
Some parts of the system are Internet-enabled (JAVA clients communicate with COBOL server-processes via 'inetd').
The migration was performed out of a WANG-Resource installation running on AIX, to a MicroFocus COBOL - ServerExpress environment running on HPUX11.0 or AIX, optionally accessing an ORACLE 9i database.
The main objective of the migration project was to maintain Datatech's ability to serve its WANG-ReSource clients while supporting the clients already running the converted version of the same programs. ACC created a fully automated migration environment that allows Datatech's programmers to maintain the WANG-programs in the Wang-ReSource development environment and immediately enable the test/debug of their changes in the MicroFocus test environment. This is done by utilizing the operational documentation and training provided by ACC. The migration environment is equipped with a subsystem that automatically updates the test system every night with all program code changes performed by the WANG programmers on the previous day.
In addition, support for Oracle and MicroFocus installation and training was a part of the project.
The conversion process
Compared with other ACC projects, this project's start-up phase was longer than others (3 months) because of the requirements of both parties to specify the local migration requirements vs. tuning the converter to meet these requirements.
Upon Datatech's request, the conversion was performed in two phases: the first, to convert the applications with flat files (and install it at clients not wishing to go to ORACLE); the second phase, to create an Oracle version.
The first client site cutover of the converted COBOL application occurred in March 2001. The Oracle system, ready for cutover, was provided to Datatech in July 2001 and was subsequently installed.
A relatively new MicroFocus product, ServerExpress V1.1 was used for the project. ACC, through its close coordination with the Micro Focus organization was able to diagnose and correct many of the new product errors. and to the delight of Datatech, was able to work around those errors that required more time for Micro Focus to correct. This facility was a definite enabler for an on-time delivery.
ACC and Datatech also performed some benchmarking activities on ServerExpress that allowed the converted application to meet the performance requirements of the application logic. This was reached partially by introducing new conversion steps and deployment methods, partially by working together with MicroFocus Corporation to improve their product.
The migration of the data and data access code to ORACLE was also fully automated. As part of this effort, the consistency of the WANG FDs and the ORACLE table structures was critical. In order to ensure that, ACC developed an automated "metadata" extractor utility that propagates the COBOL changes to the ORACLE table definitions and ORACLE data every night.
As a software vendor, Datatech has set high standards for database normalization, for creating a more RDMBS-like database than would result from the usual field-to-column translation. ACC assessed Datatech's coding standards and implemented an automated tool to extract all related information from the existing COBOL-code. In addition, ACC defined and implemented a syntax for the exception situations; this enables the COBOL-programmers to put normalization instructions into their code in the form of COBOL-comments.
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