CCA's Insight 204 Symposium
Announcing a New Model
204 Customer Conference for the Next Millennium
It gives us great pleasure
to announce a brand new Model 204 annual customer conference that will debut
in the spring of the year 2000. Called CCA's Insight 204 Symposium,
it is designed to provide you with the knowledge you need to fully leverage
your investment in Model 204 and increase your competitive advantage. The
symposium is sponsored by Computer Corporation of America, and preparations
are already underway for the maiden conference to be held in the Boston
area.
Why
the new symposium?
To the world of information
systems, the new millennium brings more challenges and opportunities than
the industry has ever seen before. The key to successfully meeting those
challenges and fully exploiting those opportunities is to acquire the knowledge
you need as quickly and efficiently as possible.
That's why we've created
CCA's Insight 204 Symposium - to give you the best possible forum
for acquiring the knowledge you need about Model 204, quickly and efficiently.
Key
benefits of the new symposium
Because it is completely
organized by Computer Corporation of America, CCA's Insight 204 Symposium
offers significant benefits not found at any other conference, including:
Symposium
details
Over the next year,
you will receive more information about CCA's Insight 204 Symposium.
We also encourage you to keep an eye on our Web site, www.cca-int.com,
for the most up-to-date information at all times. Please keep this new symposium
in mind as you plan your educational activities for the year 2000, as we
are certain it will be the one conference that you won't want to miss!
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System
1032
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- Y2K Application
Questions
by Tym Stegner
Although OpenVMS and
System 1032 Version 9.7 and later have few if any specific Y2K issues, those
that crop up are likely to be application related. As interesting Y2K-related
questions arise over the coming months, we'll share the questions and answers
with you.
Question:
Does System 1032 have
a system variable to force users to enter 4-digit years?
Answer:
The System 1032 programmer
who asked this question is updating a forms application for Y2K compliance.
A particular date attribute's range of possible values is from the late
1800s into the 21st Century. Modifying the form fields is going well (updating
the fieldsí ranges and lengths, and using $CENTURY_BOUNDARY), but
the application has an Expert mode, where certain users can enter System 1032
commands interactively.
It is within this Expert
mode that the programmer wants to enforce 4-digit years when used with update
commands. Because some dates might be within the 1800s, $CENTURY_BOUNDARY
does not cure all the possible dates. ($C/B allows pivot dates encompassing
only a 101-year range.)
I qualified the problem
to be one of "intercession"; at some point, there must be intervention
to ensure that the year values are properly entered. I offered the following
suggestions on how a programmatic solution might be developed.
Intercede at the data update
level
Create an update trigger
procedure to examine the date attributes after an update, and notify the
user of an inconsistency in the value. Update triggers have access only
to the dataset, not to the actual update command itself. Unless the date
values are within a global variable available to the trigger procedure,
the trigger would have no way of determining the data values to be used
by the command.
Intercede
at the command level
Redefine commands using
command variables, or apply security to the dataset such that "canned"
procedures must be used to update the dataset.
By use of command variables
to send command parameters to a parsing procedure, a procedure can ensure
that the dates passed are of the proper century, before allowing the update.
The parsing procedure might alternatively enable an OpenVMS identifier to
accept updates from within the procedure, rather than from true interactive
access. This method would override those users who know how to override
redefined commands.
Intercede at the prompt
level
When the expert user
is granted access to the PL1032 prompt, output a reminder message that all
years must be expressed as 4-digit years.
Then use special data
types and/or an update trigger to audit the interactively applied commands.
The application might enable the update trigger before dropping the user
to the interactive mode, then disable the auditing trigger afterwards. A
review of this auditing information could lead to personal reminders to
erring expert users, or even to a removal of that person's ability to perform
expert updates.
US'99 - Symposium Update
by Nancy Diettrich
Happy New Year to all
our users! Less than three months remain until our System 1032 User Symposium,
and the response from all of you has been very enthusiastic.
We still need presenters
from the user community. We would be very interested to hear how you are
using System 1032 and/or ODBC to bring your applications into the 21st Century.
What kinds of experiences did you have when you tested your applications
for Y2K compliance? Perhaps ODBC/S1032 has solved a user problem for you.
Perhaps you had users that needed to access the same data but from different
ODBC compliant software. Or perhaps ODBC enabled you to continue to store
your data in System 1032 while meeting a requirement from upper management
to use a PC-based application.
I am sure that other
users would be very interested to hear how you are meeting your particular
challenge. This symposium provides a chance for all System 1032 users to
exchange information and benefit from each others' experiences.
Remember, CCA will
pay for accommodations for any one accepted as a speaker. If you have questions
or are concerned about pulling your presentation together, Customer Support
is happy to help. So feel free to bounce a few ideas off of Tym and me.
See you in March!
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Model
204
Y2K Prospects - Caviar and Champagne?
by David Webb
It's January'99 - the
new millennium is almost with us. Will it be the greatest party in history,
or will it herald the worst years we have ever known? I tend to the pessimistic
side. In this complex world, the comforts, affluence, and order that we
have become accustomed to in the late 20th Century depend on the smooth
interaction of countless information systems, small and large. How many
of these can fail, yet leave our way of life unaffected?
Take the simple example
of traffic, on a normal day. Those of us who live in metropolitan areas
know only too well how one car accident at peak times can cause delays and
congestion far out of proportion to the original event. A small disruption
causes chaos across a network.
Now think how much
more complex, and how much more prone to failure are the many systems on
which we now rely. What collateral damage will be caused to entire financial
systems, healthcare systems, defense systems, and manufacturing systems
by some small failure, somewhere in the chain of information flow? Those
pernicious software bugs are going to be much harder to find and clear than
a couple of damaged cars from the highway.
It is already far too
late for the software industry to fix all the world's systems - it's too
late even to fix just the important ones. Those of us who work with Model
204 tend to forget just how difficult it is to work in other software environments,
where data structures are hard to change, programs are tough to read, and
source code can be lost forever.
So what should we be
doing about it? Our priority must be to ensure that the systems for which
we are responsible are top line and fully tested. Can you answer Yes to
the following questions?
- Do you have Y2K compliant
versions of all your systems software applied?
For Model 204, this
is Version 4.1.1, to ensure that you have all maintenance applied. But
you also need to check all the rest of the systems software you have,
such as your job schedulers and your cartridge management systems.
- Are all date fields
now in YYYY or CYY format?
Displaying data in
YY format is fine, of course, but if you are storing your data
as YY, you have to be very careful with your coding.
- Have you scanned your
code to ensure that all your date processing is compliant?
It should contain
no implicit assumptions about 19xx, no variables too short to handle
4-digit years, and no local date routines yet to be certified compliant.
- Have you scanned your
data to validate its integrity?
Model 204 makes it
very easy to change YY dates to YYYY, but before you expand
those fields to include 19 in the front, make sure you're not creating
peculiarities such as 19NODATE.
- Are you putting all
new functional changes to your application on top of Y2K compliant code?
It's no good having
two parallel versions of your software, one containing new functionality
but the other being the Y2K compliant version of the original code.
- Have you tested, have
you really really tested?
There's an awful
lot to be done to prove that your system is Y2K compliant. Ideally you
should exercise full scale running of your environment over an extended
period of time with realistic transaction loads, with your system believing
it's crossed the millennium boundary. You'll need an LPAR (or a separate
machine). You'll also need to involve a lot of real users, and you'll
have to exercise daily, weekly, and other batch cycles. It's going to
need all the input that you usually take from other systems, and will
require you to send the output to other external systems. It's hard work,
it's expensive, and you need a lot of time to do it properly (and, in
the case of some systems, especially those driving real-time process equipment,
it may be impossible).
If you answered No
to any of these questions, it's time to give CCA a call. We have our own
Y2K
Remediation Factory, staffed by experienced Model 204 professionals,
using proven tools and methodologies. We take your application code and
your test data, load it onto our machine, scan it, make it Y2K compliant,
test and document our work, and then return it to you.
We can also provide
other services, such as installation of V4.1.1, an audit of your work, or
a test environment for time-warp testing.
If you've answered
Yes to all these questions, then you're probably in pretty good shape. Now
is the time to preach the virtues of Model 204 to your management and your
colleagues, struggling against the odds to make their COBOL environment
Year 2000 compliant, or trying to finish a major new implementation on time.
If their task is just too difficult to do, remember that one of the great
strengths of Model 204 is as a Rapid Application Development environment.
No other product is better equipped to build a Get-You-By system cheaply,
reliably, and effectively.
This is a vital year
for our industry... it is time to concentrate on the essentials. Whatever
else you achieve during 1999 will count for little unless your systems are
fully working in January 2000. If you do not have the time or resources
to get you there, then please call us now.
