As the owner of your HP3000 system, you’re probably fond of its capabilities as a business application platform. You’ve invested years in building your customized applications which exactly fit your business needs. At the same time, you may feel the pressure to provide Windows based reporting capabilities to your user community, so that they can start using tools like MS Access or Excel to report the HP3000-based data.
Sometimes the pressure to migrate off your HP3000 is not really based on its capabilities as a transactional system or even its planned obsolescence, but rather, on its reporting GUI. To be blunt, others just want the system to seem more state-of-the-art.
As a short or long term response to the migration question, many companies have simply provided Windows access to the HP3000 data, by providing an MS SQL “data warehouse” which houses a copy of their HP3000 data. Having set up an MS SQL copy of the data, these companies then begin developing reports against this data using Access, Excel, or web-based tools like ColdFusion or Cognos Report Studio, and are content to leave the transactional processing to the HP3000.
The “reporting” copy of the data on SQL Server keeps users off the HP3000, a security advantage often cited by companies who opt for this topography. It also allows for easier integration with other Windows or RDBMS based systems, using the plethora of tools available on Windows.
Using a tool like TIPS, available from Resource3000, you can easily build a SQL Server database which houses all or part of your HP3000 data, and have it refreshed from the HP3000 on a scheduled basis. In fact, a productionalized, automatically-fed data warehouse can be set up in about one day.
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