PowerHouse and RMS/Oracle Databases

Tue, 14 May 2002 13:08:52 -0500

The 'box' that Oracle resides on is pretty immaterial, though 2MB may mean
slow performance. The issues I'd worry about are all on the VMS PowerHouse
side. If the tables you'll be reading/writing are new, not being converted
from RMS, that will simplify your life considerably. If you're converting
existing files to tables, you're in for a lot of fun...

However, the words "upgrade to PowerHouse 8.30D (and recompile the
application)" are the understatement of the year. Now, we're on 8.20.D7,
not 8.30D, and 8.30D is supposed to be much closer to 7.10 than was 8.20 -
but I can almost guarantee you're going to be facing some major issues in
moving from 7.10, mostly in RMS file locking... DO NOT treat this like you
would any prior PowerHouse upgrade, because it isn't. Plan on the recompile
failing on some of your code, and then once you've fixed the code, plan on
a full testing cycle to find all of the "differences" in how PH 8 handles
things. Look especially carefully at putting SET LOCK RECORD UPDATE in
every QTP, and LOCK file RECORD in your Quick while retreiving clauses.
Eliminate as many "LINK... AND..." sets as you can, as "AND" may still have
some issues, too. But the biggest will be locking, as that's hard to find
problems in until your application goes 'live'. We've got a long list of
'gotchas' we found, but unfortunately not in a form that's easily sent to
someone else; and some of what we found has probably been fixed by Cognos
by now anyway.

Good luck!

Bill

                    Trevor Dockeray                                                                                                       
                    <Trevor.Dockeray@Lights       To:     "PowerHouse List (E-mail)" <powerh-l@lists.swau.edu>                            
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                    Sent by:                      Subject:     PowerHouse and RMS/Oracle Databases                                        
                    powerh-l-admin@cube.swa                                                                                               
                    u.edu                                                                                                                 

                    05/14/2002 06:12 AM                                                                                                   

Hi All

Here is a question for those with experience of:
*    Compaq Alpha,
*    Running OpenVMS 7.1-1H1,
*    With PowerHouse (7.10G2 at present - we realise that this will need
to be upgraded to 8.30D to use Oracle) application,
*    Using RMS data files,
*    And Oracle!

We will need to read and write to an Oracle Database on a 'box' running a
'flavour' of Unix (yes - for those of you who may have guessed, this
machine
and operating system have not yet been completely specified/purchased yet)

With the added 'feature' of having the PowerHouse application server some
distance away (100's of miles) to the Oracle Application server over a 2mb
network link.

I understand from Cognos we will need to upgrade to PowerHouse 8.30D (and
recompile the application), install an PowerHouse Oracle licence, install
an
Oracle user licence for the Alpha and configure necessary TNS.ORA file,
sequel net etc...

Although this will probably work where the RMS files and Oracle database
are
on the same machine, we have no idea if it will work on between two
machines/two operating systems/two locations over a 2mb WAN...

Does anyone have any experience of this?

Will it work?

How well will it perform?

TIA

Regards,

Trevor Dockeray