Port your Adabas/Natural Application to another Platform
The Problem
When your Adabas/Natural application is running on an OS that no longer suits your strategic purposes or the manufacturer of the OS is pushing you towards a platform change, then migration can often present a huge challenge in terms of the “mission critical” apps at your company This is because Adabas and Natural applications have usually been implemented in a platform-specific manner and certain tools and functions are not even available in the potential target hardware. Yet the consolidation of computer architectures and operating systems often represents a great chance to cut operating, licensing and maintenance costs for both running operations and updates.
The Solution
It is imperative that an intensive analysis of the source environment and all of its relevant aspects is done prior to porting. Based on PKS’s own parsers and tools from selected partner companies, we are capable of doing in-depth examinations of even complex environments and conducting a sustainable risk analysis for porting. This analysis is geared towards your strategic goals on the one hand, and of course towards what makes technical and economic sense. Allowance has to be made especially for the aspect of performance, which by all means must be comparable with that of the original system. Through our long-year experience gained in numerous projects for our customers, we also have the necessary human resource skills it takes to successfully carry out such a project. Procedure
- Analysis of the original environment in terms of all relevant aspects
- Examples include:
- Launching non-Natural programs
- Using user exits, hex variables/constants, binary variables
- Using packed values in work files for interfaces
- Using SORTED BY or the internal NATURAL-SORTs, STARTING FROM or
ENDING AT clauses (EBCDIC – ASCii)
- Examination of batch control and parallelism online/batch, e.g. through the
use of NATRJE
- Porting of the development environment (tools, configuration management, etc.)
- Porting of the production environment
- A testing concept that preferably avoids or minimizes the test of special fields
- The analysis results in the identification of all the areas in all programs that have to be modified. In addition, the concept for productive operation and development and maintenance are stipulated in the target platform.
- Also, the porting concept is mapped out in detail and compiled with the project plan and expenditures for project work and any licenses which might be needed.
- Through a prototype (proof of concept), the procedure is checked in a small part of the application
- Execution of the project
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