Migrate: Learn More

Migrate utilizes our Analyzer Windows application to provide direct, read-only access to your mainframe data.

• Because it’s direct, you get the fastest possible performance. In addition, you see the data with zero latency, eliminating the need for operational data store or data mart technologies.
• Because it’s read-only, your data is secure. While your Windows applications have access to your mainframe data set, they have no ability to write back.
• Because it’s Windows based, it’s incredibly easy to install and administer. The Windows interface ensures an ease of use that is uncommon for mainframe query utilities.

It’s as if your entire source data set could be added to a data mart in a matter of hours.

Analyzer communicates directly with our native mainframe server via TCP/IP. There are no additional hardware or software components required for connectivity. This direct connection to our mainframe server offers a number of benefits:

• The low component count means low infrastructure. This translates directly into low costs, both to install and maintain.
• Since no additional software interfaces are required, you are up and running quickly, with your existing equipment.
• Having a mainframe resident server gives you the maximum access to your legacy data, including DB2, IMS, VSAM and sequential (QSAM) flat files. You don’t need any additional technologies to transform the data for access.

When mainframe resource constraints make direct access solutions impractical, or where we do not offer a native server for your source platform, Arbutus also enables you to easily offload your processing to open servers. Unlike typical open server implementations, Arbutus’s open servers (Windows and Linux) are fully compatible with all data set structures and data types encountered on your mainframe. This means that the process of staging data is as simple as a file transfer, with no data transformation required.

The result is you can implement a data mart style solution, with full access to all your Windows applications, in a matter of days.

This is a revolutionary approach to the problem of mainframe data conversion and migration.

Other Features:

Other Windows Connectivity

If you choose to access the source data with other Windows tools, or the target database itself, Migrate utilizes our LegacyLink™ ODBC driver. It provides all the same data connectivity as Analyzer, but interfaces directly with any Windows application. As a result, you can use your preferred tools to access the source data directly. This improves the scope of the data they can process, and also simplifies the process dramatically.

Secure Operation

All mainframe access with Migrate is through independently set up mainframe accounts. These accounts control the access rights of the individual user, to ensure that only the appropriate data is accessed.

Process the Most Complex Data

Migrate includes the capability to access virtually any complexity of data, while presenting it in a standard tabular format. It is not limited to fixed length files, but can also handle variable length, multiple record type and even segmented file structures. As well, every data format supported by your mainframe, even bit level fields, can be automatically read and converted for use.

Built for Mainframe Data

Migrate isn’t a Windows application that has been modified to read mainframe data. Instead, it was built from the ground up specifically for this task. It is designed to handle the data types, and data volumes that you will encounter.

Combine Disparate Data Sources

Migrate allows multiple source tables to be combined into a single view, using Data Relations. This creates a star schema model that directly accesses the source data sets. An important characteristic of this capability is there are few restrictions on the combination of even disparate data sources. You could easily have a consolidated table view that combines information from VSAM with information from IMS, DB2 and sequential data sets.

Proprietary Indexes

Migrate includes the ability to create indexes on sequential data sets. While these are in a proprietary format, they essentially allow the file to behave like a VSAM file. This means you can have direct indexed access, even to data that does not have a native index.

Where native indexes exist, these are automatically used to optimize query performance.

Virtual Columns

Migrate does far more than just provide access to your mainframe data sources. It also includes over 80 data manipulation functions, which can be used with virtual columns to implement virtually any business rule, calculation or transformation. Virtual columns are processed dynamically, without altering the source data, and are presented totally transparently to the end user.

What this means is any transformation you require, whether it be data name, size, type, format or even the result of the application of a complex set of business rules, can be implemented as an automatically processed transform via virtual columns!

Customizable Data Interface

Migrate allows you full control over the data interface presented to users. The comprehensive semantic layer allows individualized customization for each set of users, controlling the content and naming of both tables and their columns.

Discovery Based Investigation and Mapping

Why guess about your data, based on possibly out-of-date documentation, when you can derive true information, directly from the data itself?

Migrate’s powerful capabilities allow you to implement a dramatically different, and more powerful, model to address data migration and conversion projects. You no longer need to perform extensive research before you have any access to the source data. Instead, you can link to the data in a matter of minutes and then immediately start creating data-based analyses and true metadata, based on the data itself.

Migrate includes our powerful Windows based analysis tool, Analyzer, that can not only be used to directly query and report on the source data, but can also help reconcile with the target system. Using a simple point-and-click interface you can create an almost limitless variety of analyses. Exception reports can be generated based upon virtually any criteria you can conceive. You also have the ability to sort, summarize, subset and otherwise process the data to better highlight other possible data problems.

You can check the referential integrity of your data, scan for blank or invalid data values, check for inconsistent data, confirm data formatting, or even identify every unique code value used within a column. All of this is just a few clicks away.

Even this is just the start. Analyzer includes a wide range of column statistics, stratification, sequence, gaps, duplicates and exception testing as well as cross tabulation. These can be combined with the transformation and manipulation capabilities to support virtually any analytic requirement.

Please see our whitepaper for a more complete description of this opportunity.

Procedures

The Arbutus technologies include procedures based on a fully capable 4GL scripting language. These can be used to automate any of your migration processes, to ensure repeatability. This also allows essentially unlimited control over the business logic implemented.

Simplified Maintenance

All connectivity is maintained using Analyzer, so there is no need for a separate administrative tool. Creating new table linkages is guided by a wizard based expert system. As well, in most cases, our metadata conversion can be used to automatically create the initial definition directly from your copybooks. Modifying table definitions is a simple point and click.