News & Events – B.O.S. User Symposium 2006

The annual meeting of the users of B.O.S. products was held at the Linder Airport Hotel in Düsseldorf, Germany, on May 15 2006. It was the 5th Symposium jointly conducted by B.O.S. and the User Community. The customers of the tcVISION product also attended the event. The highlights of the meeting have been the user presentations and the detailed presentations of the new versions of tcACCESS and tcVISION.

 

B.O.S. presented the implementation of a bi-directional datasynchronization at RDC Datacentrum, Amsterdam (The Netherlands). RDC is a VSE installation that uses CA-IDMS databases. tcACCESS and tcVISION help RDC to migrate from CA-IDMS to DB2/UDB on UNIX-AIX and to MS-SQLServer on Windows. The bi-directional datasynchronization is accomplished with the help of tcACCESS to directly perform updates on CA-IDMS from UNIX and WINDOWS applications. All changes applied to CA-IDMS from mainframe online- and batch-applications are being captured in realtime by tcVISION and are propagated to DB2/UDB and MS-SQLServer. tcVISION automatically recognizes changes performed by tcACCESS. These changes will be propagated to the OpenSystem applications only under certain conditions. This controlled propagation ("Loopback processing") is necessary, because internal pointer maintained by the network oriented CA-IDMS database must also be maintained in the OpenSystem DBMSs as "Foreign Keys". RDC is a B.O.S. customer since the end of 2004 (also refer to user story "RDC speaks your business language"). 

 

 

  

     

Another example for a bi-directional datasynchronization has also been presented by B.O.S. for ADABAS and MS-SQLServer.

Lothar Stein, CTO of BRUNATA METRONA, Hürth Germany, talked about his experience with the implementation of a datasynchronization between DL/I and DB2 using tcVISION. Mr. Stein outlined the cooperation between BRUNATA and B.O.S. Both companies closely worked together to come up with a reliable, secure and well performing solution to automatically capture all changes from CICS- and batch-applications applied to DL/I databases in realtime. The resulting solution is production as of today. All changes made by CICS- and batch-applications are captured by tcVISION and these changes are stored into a DB2 database (alternatively a VSAM KSDS). These changes can be processed on any given interval (currently every 30 minutes) by BRUNATA applications to synch the DB2 databases. Mr. Stein also pointed out the importance of tcACCESS during the migration process from DL/I to DB2. Detailed information can be obtained from user story "Change data into information".
  

  

Mr. Peter Szablewski representing the "Kommunale Datenverarbeitungs Zentrale (KDVZ) Rhein Erft", Frechen Germany, spoke about their implementation of tcACCESS. Main focus of his presentation was the application "Driver license registration". This application is in use at various cities and counties that use the computer services of KDVZ. The application is a Client/Server application and must access the citizen information stored in an IMS database on the z/OS mainframe. The databases have been designed about 30 years ago and consist of bit-compressed data, variable segments and compressed keys. The access to these legacy data is performed with tcACCESS (refer to user story "Hierarchical data in a relational robe"). Peter Szablewski presented a SQL-statement in detail, that demonstrated the power and flexibility of tcACCESS.

 

The attendees of the Symposium were impressed by the functions of the new versions of tcACCESS and tcVISION. B.O.S. performed some live demos to demonstrate the new functions (i.e. DB2/UDB and ORACLE as SQL-Engine tables). 

Detailed information about tcACCESS Version 7 can be obtained here. 

Use this link to learn more about tcVISION Version 2. 

Like the past meetings the users came up with ideas and suggestions for additional functionalities. 

The participants encouraged B.O.S. to plan the next meeting again for two days. The users want to get together in the evening and have the chance to talk to each other and to the B.O.S. representatives. 

          

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