IMS Open Database

The latest webinar from Virtual IMS CONNECTION (www.virtualims.com) was entitled, “IMS Open DB functionality in IMS V11”, and was presented by Kevin Hite, an IMS lead tester with IBM. Kevin is a software engineer originally from Rochester, NY, who has worked in IBM for both WebSphere for z/OS and IMS. He is the test lead for IMS V11 Open Database and is the team lead for a new test area, IMS Solution Test. Solution Test is responsible for integrating new IMS function to customer-like applications in a customer-like environment.

IMS Open Database is new in V11, and Kevin informed the user group that it offers scalable, distributed, and high-speed local access to IMS database resources. The product allows business growth, and allows more flexibility in accessing IMS data to meet growth challenges, while at the same time allowing IMS databases to be processed as a standards-based data server.

What makes IMS Open Database different is its standards-based approach, using Java Connector Architecture 1.5 (Java EE), JDBC, SQL, and DRDA. It enables new application design frameworks and patterns.

One particular highlight Kevin identified with the new solution was three universal drivers. These include:

• Universal DB resource adapter
  – JCA 1.5, which provides: XA transaction support and local transaction support; connection pooling; connection sharing; and the availability of multiple programming models (JDBC, CCI with SQL interactions, and CCI with DLI interactions).
• Universal JDBC driver
• Universal DLI driver.

With distributed access:

• All Universal drivers support type 4 connectivity to IMS databases from TCP/IP-enabled platforms and runtimes, including:
  – Windows
  – zLinux
  – z/OS
  – WebSphere Application Server
  – Stand-alone Java SE
• Resource Recovery Services (RRS) is not required if applications do not require distributed two-phase commit.

For local connectivity, Kevin informed us that the Universal driver support for type 2 connectivity to IMS databases from z/OS runtimes includes WebSphere Application Server for z/OS, IMS Java dependent regions, CICS z/OS, and DB2 z/OS stored procedures.

The two Universal drivers for JDBC – IMS Universal DB Resource Adapter and IMS Universal JDBC Driver – offer a greatly-enhanced JDBC implementation including:

• JDBC 3.0
• Local commit/rollback support
• Standard SQL implementation for the SQL subset supported
  – Keys of parent segments are included in table as foreign keys, and allows standard SQL implementation
• Updatable result sets
• Metadata discovery API implementation
  – Uses metadata generated by DLIModel Utility as “catalog data”
  – Enables JDBC tooling to work with IMS DBs just as they do with DB2 DBs.

This is just a small part of a very interesting presentation and gives little more than a flavour of what IMS professionals can expect from IMS Open Database in V11 of IMS.

How old is old?

Picking up on my blog of a couple of weeks ago about COBOL reaching 50 this year, I thought it might be interesting to see just how old some of the technology we know and love actually is.

For example, CICS – the Customer Information Control System – has been around since 1969. Although we tend to associate CICS with IBM Hursley these days, it was originally developed at Des Planes in the USA and was called PU-CICS, with the PU bit standing for Public Utility. In the early 1970s, development was at Palo Alto, but moved to Hursley in 1974.

IMS – Information Management System – is even older, having first appeared in 1968. IMS was developed for the space race and contributed to the success of the Apollo program. It’s said, but no-one knows outside of IBM, that IMS is IBM's highest revenue software product. If you’re not already aware, I organize the Virtual IMS Connection user group at www.virtualims.com. It’s free to join and you get six free Webinars a year and six free user group newsletters. But I digress.

Batch processing goes right back to the very early days of computing in the 1950s.

TSO, or Time Sharing Option, first appeared in the early 1960s. Originally, and there’s a clue in its name, it was an optional extra on OS/MVT (Operating System/ Multiprogramming with a Variable number of Tasks), a precursor to MVS. TSO became a standard feature with the release of MVS in 1974. ISPF (Interactive System Productivity Facility), which is associated with TSO, didn’t appear until the 1980s.

DB2 – database 2 – first appeared in 1983. DB2 is a relational database, and as well as on mainframes, turns up on PCs and other IBM platforms. It competes with Oracle and Microsoft’s SQL Server products on these other platforms. Oracle appeared in 1979.

Mainframes themselves were developed during the 1950s.

The World Wide Web is meant to have come into existence in 1991 – thanks to the work of Tim Berners Lee.

IBM came into existence in 1924, when a company called CTR changed its name to IBM. It had been trading as IBM in Canada since 1917.

Microsoft was founded in 1978 – but enough about them.

Citrix was founded in 1989 by Ed Iacobucci and others who’d worked on the ill-fated OS/2 project at IBM.

COBOL’s 50. Java was first released by Sun Microsystems in 1995. It was based on the work of James Gosling. The language was initially called Oak. The international standard for C++ came in 1998.

It’s interesting looking back and realizing just what a significant effect these golden oldie technologies have had, and how they will continue to thrive into the foreseeable future.

zPrime rattles a few cages

I seem to be spending the summer talking about zIIP and zAAP (System z Integrated Information Processor, and System z Application Assist Processors). And a couple of weeks ago I was enthusing about NEON Enterprise Software’s new zPrime product and how users should get it and save money before IBM changed the rules.

And I’m inclined to still think that way, it’s just that IBM has responded to the announcement much faster than I imagined.

For people who’ve been living off-planet, IBM charges users by the amount of General Purpose Processor (GPP) they use, while also making specialty processors available for things like Linux and DB2. Now, doing your processing in a specialty processor saves money because you’re not using the chargeable GPPs – and in real life can save money by putting off the need for an expensive upgrade. Into this situation comes the zPrime bombshell. Using their new software, NEON reckons that 50% of workloads can run on specialty processors – that’s not just DB2, that’s IMS, CICS, TSO/ISPF, batch, whatever.

Not surprisingly, at the thought of seeing their potential revenue cut in half, IBM has taken a dim view of the announcement. In a recent customer letter, IBM’s Mark S Anzani, VP and Chief Technology Officer for System z, cautions customers about the zPrime product. Apparently, customers with questions about IBM’s position on zPrime can contact Mark on anzani@us.ibm.com.

The customer letter contains the following paragraph:
“In general, any product which is designed to cause additional workloads, not designated by IBM or other SW providers as eligible to run on the Specialty Engines, to nevertheless to be routed to a Specialty Engine should be evaluated to determine whether installation and use of such a product would violate, among other things, the IBM Customer Agreement (for instance, Section 4 regarding authorized use of IBM program products such as z/OS) and/or the license governing use of the IBM “Licensed Internal Code” (frequently referred to as “LIC”) running on IBM System z servers, or license agreements with any third party software providers.”

NEON sent out a press release on 16 July saying: “NEON Enterprise Software is responding to a massive wave of interest over a newly-released software product called NEON zPrime that saves mainframe users millions of dollars in IT costs by realizing the full potential of IBM System z specialty processors.”

And how do other software vendors feel about this? CA – probably the biggest apart from IBM – ignores the announcement. The latest e-mail I have says that Chris O’Malley, executive vice president and general manager of CA’s Mainframe Business Unit, will deliver a keynote address to SHARE in Denver. As usual, no word from BMC. No it’s a PR company for DataDirect that drew my attention to Gregg Willhoit’s blog (http://blogs.datadirect.com/2009/07/ibm-cautions-customers-about-neon-enterprise-softwares-zprime-product.html) and the IBM customer letter (http://blogs.datadirect.com/media/IBM%20position%20document.pdf) on the DataDirect site.

It will be interesting to see how many customers install zPrime and what happens next.

COBOL on the mainframe

It was 50 years ago today... Sgt Pepper taught a band to play – so might go the lyrics to Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the title track for the Beatles’ eighth album and first concept album, which was released on 1 June 1967. And it was 50 years ago (although not to the day) that Grace Hopper gave the world COBOL – COmmon Business-Oriented Language.

It seems that a committee comprising William Selden and Gertrude Tierney from IBM, Howard Bromberg and Howard Discount from RCA, and Vernon Reeves and Jean E Sammet from Sylvania Electric Products completed the specifications for COBOL in December 1959. So where does Grace Hopper fit in? Well, the specifications were greatly inspired by the FLOW-MATIC language invented by Grace Hopper, and a couple of others. The name COBOL was agreed by the committee on 18 September 1959.

COBOL programs couldn’t run until compilers had been built, so it wasn’t until December 1960 that what was essentially the same COBOL program ran on two different makes of computers – an RCA computer and a Remington-Rand Univac computer.

Not surprisingly, there have been a number of developments in COBOL over the 50 years. The American National Standards Institute (ANSI) developed a standard form of the language in 1968 (known as American National Standard (ANS) COBOL). There was a 1974 revised version, and in 1985 there was another revision. And the most recent revision was 2002.

Still, after 50 years, there can’t be many people using it – after all, the computer industry is high tech, not old tech! This view, which I heard quite forcibly expressed the other day, is simply not true. Figures quoted – and I’m never sure how anyone could accurately know this, but it seems about right – suggest that there are more than 220 billion lines of COBOL in use – arguably 80% of the world’s actively used code. It’s also been suggested that there are 200 times as many COBOL transactions in a day than Google searches!

Now, a lot of this code is on mainframes, and companies like Micro Focus are keen to get mainframers onto other platforms. One difficulty with this for mainframers is what to do with their COBOL programs. To help, Micro Focus last week announced Reuze, a tool for migrating business processes from the mainframe to Windows, without having to rewrite applications.

In most cases, Reuze allows the COBOL programs to remain unchanged, eliminating the need to rewrite the source code for SQL Server or to remove mainframe syntax, says the company. It supports 64-bit Windows architectures and the .NET Framework.

The product has two components: Developer, a client-based graphical tool for migrating applications to Windows; and Server, the deployment environment for the migrated applications. Developer includes an integrated development environment based on Microsoft Visual Studio, and allows for cross-team collaboration.

I’m sure smaller mainframe sites will find this of interest; larger ones, perhaps less so. But whatever size machine you run your COBOL on, say happy birthday to it!

zIIP and zAAP again

It seems like only a couple (three in fact) weeks ago that I was talking about specialty processors, and here I go again! Last time I mentioned Tom Harper’s presentation to the Virtual IMS Connection virtual IMS user group, DataDirect’s Shadow software (which exploits zIIP specialty engines), and CA’s survey of IFL specialty engine usage.

Just for clarification for those of you who tuned in late, zIIP stands for System z Integrated Information Processor, and zAAP stands for System z Application Assist Processors.

Since I wrote that last blog, we have had two specialty engine announcements – one from NEON Enterprise Software and one from WinterGreen Research that links with DataDirect’s Shadow product.

WinterGreen Research, an analyst firm, has announced that it has completed work on a Web-based calculator to measure the Total-Cost-of-Ownership (TCO) of mainframe SOA enablement when utilizing a zIIP specialty engine in combination with DataDirect Shadow integration middleware. The calculator can compute the daily and annual savings in dollars and MIPS capacity that can occur by exploiting the zIIP specialty engine rather than the General Purpose Processor (GPP). DataDirect Shadow Version 7 expands the utilization of the zIIP specialty engine beyond DB2 to include Adabas, IMS/DB, IDMS, and VSAM as well SOAP/XML parsing necessary for creating Web services within the mainframe to applications residing within CICS, IMS/TM, IDMS, and Natural – the company claims. Full details are available from www.datadirect.com/company/news/press/pressitem/pressrelease_1249553/index.ssp.

More interesting is the announcement from NEON, which has announced NEON zPrime, which can facilitate the transfer of as much as 50 percent or more of a company’s IMS, DB2, CICS, TSO/ISPF, and batch workloads from System z CPs to zIIP or zAAP processors, and consequently reduce mainframe costs significantly – the company claims. Mainframe users now have more options of what workloads to move to a specialty processor to meet capacity planning and cost optimization objectives. NEON zPrime is 100 percent compliant with IBM specifications, rules, and conditions for System z processor access to assure a seamless environment that makes IMS, CICS, TSO/ISPF, DB2, batch jobs, and NEON IMS utilities workloads eligible for processing on zIIPs or zAAPs. Full details are available at www.neonesoft.com/neon/news_063009.shtm.

Now, I’m not here to recommend any organization’s software – they pay people to do that, and I haven’t noticed a brown envelope full of bank notes being slipped into my hands – but it seems this kind of software is going to make NEON popular with everyone except IBM! Obvously, MSUs (Metered Software Units) are IBM’s way of ensuring a regular income – and it’s based on GPP usage. If people find a way of running their software on zIIP and zAAP specialty engines then IBM will have to come up with a new pricing model.

It seems that they best policy for users is to get in quick and pay for zPrime with the savings that will be made on monthly licence fees. And then bank all future savings until IBM changes the pricing rules.

Crazy Talk 6

Every now and again, it’s good to know that there’s more to life than the serious business of running a company successfully. Sometimes, it’s a good idea to take a break and do something that’s fun. I’ve recently been playing with Version 6 of Crazy Talk from Reallusion, and it’s a great piece of software for having fun.

Very simply, what you do is take a picture of yourself, your dog, or even a famous painting (the list is really endless), and make it talk! The software moves the character’s head, blinks the eyes, and makes the mouth open and close as the image “talks”.

It’s also now possible to have two people (or pets or cartoon characters – you get the idea) in the picture and animate both of them so they appear to be having a conversation. And if you feel very adventurous you can animate up to four heads at any one time. And all the 2D images really do appear to be 3D.

The process is very straightforward. You select an image, and the software comes with some examples if you don’t have any pictures on your computer. You can crop and rotate the image to get what you want. You can also improve the colour levels etc at this stage.

Next it guesses where the eyes and mouth are (pretty accurately on a picture of a face), and you can move these numbered circles if you wish. Next you can tell it whether the face is looking to one side or forward, and the shape of the face – important with animals!

Then you pick out the eyes you want. You can have cartoon eyes, anime, animal, comic, or human. And human come with or without a variety of eye make-up. Once you apply the eyes, they look really strange, so the next stage is to make them fit the eyes in the original picture. It’s always a good idea to zoom in and get this right. You can also change other points around the head and hair, and the lips. And you can have more points to move if you need to – and I usually do).

Next you can choose your animation’s teeth. These include the whiter than white variety, through yellow, decayed, missing, to animal!

And finally you need the head movement. You choices are affirmative, angry, calm, dislike, etc, etc. And you can select a “head motion strength”. Clicking the preview button let’s you see the head move and the eyes blink. But there’s more.

Clicking on the script button gives you the option to add sound. You could type in a script and let one of the computer default voices say it. You could record yourself, or you could import an audio file – and, of course, it comes with some example files. Plus you have emotive faces you can add, and a puppeteering panel for fine control.

So, when you are happy that the Mona Lisa is now endorsing you or your company (or whatever) you can output the file. There are already tabs for the Web and YouTube and widgets, or you can output to a media file. There is the expected range of choices starting with AVI.

Because Crazy Talk 6 comes with so many templates, it’s easy to create something that’s fun, and it’s strangely rewarding to create something that is really very clever by spending a little more time and getting down to those nitty gritty details.

It’s a great way to relax and make your friends laugh at a simple creation, it’s also quite compelling – giving your boss exact fitting snake eyes, vampire teeth, and using the default laugh! There’s hours of fun with it. And there’s more than I’ve mentioned in this short review. You can find out more at www.reallusion.com/crazytalk/.

Who can you trust?

Do you remember how in George Orwell’s 1984, O’Brien encourages Winston Smith, the central character, to practise “doublethink” – the ability to hold two contradictory ideas at the same time. It seems that the computing world is engaging in the same activity.

Now let’s be completely honest about this, you only need to get two IT “experts” in a room to have two opinions, and inviting in a third expert doesn’t settle the argument, it simply provides another opinion.

Anyway, where I’m going with this is that we either believe that mainframes are so clever at everything – like SOA, cloud computing, and finding the ultimate answer – that we don’t pay any attention to companies encouraging us to migrate our workloads off the mainframe and on to Windows servers, or we don’t. In which case we believe that Windows or Macs, or Linux machines in general are the way forward and mainframes are strange dinosaurs, mere relics of a bygone age. You can’t have it both way – unless you indulge in doublethink.

So what I am talking about? Well, The Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA) and a company called T3 Technologies may be bringing an antitrust action against IBM. It started life in Europe, but there is now a US lawsuit. They argue that IBM has unfairly sewn up the market for mainframes! You may think that good products and clever marketing meant IBM beat the BUNCH (Burroughs, UNIVAC, NCR, Control Data Corporation, and Honeywell) – for those of you who remember those far-off days.

And perhaps, as an ordinary punter who has to stump up the cash for my mainframe hardware and monthly licence fees, I might feel a distinct lack of competition. If it were a car, I could buy an alternative from a different manufacturer and perhaps save money. I’d certainly be able to drive it home from the garage. But if I don’t buy an IBM mainframe, then the alternative – products from Sun or Microsoft – leave you with a metaphorical car that you don’t know how to drive and runs on a completely different type of petrol!

You might think that the CCIA would comprise all those companies that used to sell mainframes and no longer do – the BUNCH perhaps, or companies that kept the faith and feel hard done by now that IBM rules the roost. But this is where the doublethink comes in. The very companies that eschew mainframes, that think of them as living relics – like coelacanths – are the leaders of the CCIA. We’re talking about Oracle and Microsoft, AMD and Google.

I’m an IBM Data Champion, so I tend to be on the side of the mainframe being an excellent solution for medium and large-sized organizations. I’m also a Microsoft Office Specialist Master Instructor, and I know that for many everyday activities people everywhere are using Word and Excel. But it seems like a huge amount of doublethink for Microsoft – the Windows everywhere people – to bring an antitrust suit against IBM for selling a technology to customers that they can’t satisfy.

Or does Microsoft want a slice of the mainframe market? Who can you trust?