Moving reports to HP's Unix
March 30, 2009
One year ago today, AICS Research founder Wirt Atmar asked the 3000 online community a question about migration targets. The company had rewritten its QueryCalc product from the ground up, creating a client to run in Windows and server-side code to access Unix-hosted databases. QCReports was the result, avidly used by the Summit credit union sites who've migrated to HP-UX. Wirt, who passed away almost two months ago, posed the following query on March 30 of last year:
As information rolled in, it became apparent that moving host code to the 3000 for QCReports was not going to net any appreciable interest, as Wirt defined it. But AICS Research will never turn its back on the HP 3000 customers who continue to use the original QueryCalc report writer, even as the company embraces the changes in the 3000 community's hosting. Reports need a smooth upgrade path to make a migration more efficient, and AICS is doing it right.
The AICS site includes a page that says although the company is emphasizing migration of QueryCalc data, "that migration is not mandatory. We will continue to support QueryCalc on the HP3000 until the last machine is unplugged."
QCReports will remind you of the best features of Excel once you download and start the client on your PC. What's more, AICS created a free terminal emulator, QCTerm, to aid in the evolution of QueryCalc. One Web page at the AICS site adds that the company provides an automated tool to move existing reports into the new format.
Reports are second only to a company's raw data when an organization ranks its corporate computing assets. They represent views into that data which create documents to drive decisions. The way that AICS rewrote its application, created its own emulator, then built a tool to put 3000 reports into a Unix-capable format — that's the way a migration is done by professionals.
The Summit credit union migration has been handled with similar aplomb, made easier by that vendor's choice of Eloquence as the database to replace IMAGE. We'll have an update on Eloquence and Windows in our report tomorrow.