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Making a move to another platform from the 3000 demands you bring your data. A growing array of tools can assist in this transfer, including Rosetta Store, software from Allegro Consultants that's sold by Resource 3000 partner ORBiT Software. Rosetta Store even gained a new version this year that converts IMAGE databases to Eloquence databases. But it looks like the 3000 users bound for Linux won't be able to use Rosetta. User Ernie Newton of the Yolo County School District in California reports that Allegro is putting a hold on its Linux version of the product that moves 3000 backups to non-3000 systems:

We are migrating to Linux from our HP3000 and were excited about Rosetta Store that would be a tool to access data stored on fairly old and fairly new HP3000 machines. We were told last week that this product probably was not going to be available for restore to Linux boxes because they don’t see a market for that venue.

But for Newton, and other tight-budgeted migrating 3000 shops looking at Linux, there's another way to at least move files to Linux, if not access backups directly: bytestream conversion. While it won't do everything that Rosetta Store does, it at least gets database data moved to Linux. Tony Summers, who's moving his shop to HP-UX systems, said that bytestreaming portion of his migration process can be handled by MPE, or MPEX.

Summers, who works at financial services group Smith & Williamson in the UK, said migrating the data files involved bytestreaming, packing up with a compression utility, FTP and then unpacking:

I thought about using Rosetta Store for a short while, but decided it was going to be easier to convert the data I need to export off the HP 3000 to bytestream files, and then zip/Tar these files on the HP 3000, and then FTP the file across to the target platform.  On the target platform, simply unzip and then re-load the data into your preferred database.

Summers told us that export to bytestream is a matter of using Vesoft's MPEX (with the command %Altfile <file>;byte), or use MPE/iX itself, with the tobyte command from the Posix shell. Summers cautions you shoule beware of case-sensiitive file names while using tobyte. He updated us on the migration project at his shop:

The files we will be moving to the HP-UX server will be our database files, which are all KSAM files. The plan is to unload the data from KSAM into plain text files (via FCOPY) and then convert that file to bytestream and finally FTP the resultant file to the HP-UX server and re-load the data into a version of C-ISAM.  (We have identified several versions of C-ISAM that we can use, but our final target database software will be the Vision file system of AcuCOBOL).

In fact, the conversion to Bytestream on the HP 3000 may be redundant, because the process of transferring the file via FTP to a Unix server might do this anyway.

We haven’t the requirement to be able to access old HP 3000 backup tapes. I know some HP 3000 shops have this as a regulatory requirement for 6-7 years after the end of support date. If this had been imposed on me, I would have chosen a third-party vendor who is keeping HP 3000 hardware on tap for a few years after HP’s end of support date.

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