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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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