composer

Encyclopedia upgrade and import tool

Focussing on upgrades (which the next Gen Gathering will do), it occurred to me that a great value tool would be an encyclopedia upgrade tool. This tool would not be part of the main toolset, which would continue to be able to import and upgrade the current schema, plus 2 schema levels down.

This tool would be a tool that would import ANY level of schema (say from Composer 4.0 upward) and convert it to any subsequent level of schema. This tool would take the import code from the main toolset and add it to a separate tool each time the schema was upgraded.

Why would this be a good idea?

Well – for a customer that needs to upgrade, say from Composer 4.0 to Gen 7.6, several intermediate steps would be required since there are restrictions on import and upagrde (current schema -2 levels). Having a separate (optional tool) available would mean that customers who are behind (and let’s face it – there must be a few) could purchase it and use it on a one-off basis. Having it NOT as part of the main toolset means that the main toolset then doesn’t get bloated.

Any thoughts – either post them here or come along to the Gathering on 25th June and voice them to the community.

Gathering 5 Resources

Many thanks to Sol Zimmer for the preparation and presenting of the Slideshow in the 5th Gen Gathering ! The first of the resources are now available from the 5th Gen gathering – more will be uploaded over the next few days, so keep checking back here

• Audio (downloaded times), or play it here:

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• Powerpoint Presentation Slides (downloaded times).
• eBook (downloaded times).

You can find out more about Jumar Solutions’ approach to Legacy Modernisation by going into Second Life, and clicking on their “Project Phoenix” banner at their stand at the Gen HQ, or by visiting their website. As you can see from the pictures, it was a record attendance!

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Gen Collecting

A reader of this blog is an avid collector of old Gen installation media, specifically MVS. he is also interested in other Gen-related media – books, videos etc.

He kindly photographed his collection for inclusion on the Gen History in Pictures page.

If there is anyone out there who has spare media that he can have for his collection, please make contact initially though the Contact page of gentalk.biz, or email him directly (see this post)

 It’s interesting to see the development of Gen over the years, and it’ll also allow people to relive the past times!

Gen’s rich history

Thomas Ochmann from Akra Software Development sent me some fantastic photographs of Gen’s rich history – you can click on them in the gallery below. Gen has been around for more than 20 years, as you can see from some of the dates on the media (anyone remember 5.25 inch discs ?). Particularly amusing is the collection of Gen “merchandise” he has – from Sterling Penguins to JMA mugs…

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Many thanks to Thomas for sending them in, and I hope that you all get enjoyment and possibly bringing back memories from the past by looking at them !

EDIT: See the request from Thomas for old installation media: can anyone help ?

Performance tuning with Gen – thoughts…

Does Gen offer enough facilities to allow performance tuning of its applications ?

This loosely links back to one of my earlier posts on database independance, I suppose. Most of the performance issues that I have come across seem to be with database access. I know that a lot of performance issues are to do with badly written code, such as calculations done many times within a loop, that only need to be done once etc…, but aside from removing that sort of stuff, which, really can be considered the first stage of performance tuning of any app – not just Gen ones, what more could Gen offer ?
Well, I suppose that from a point of view of hacking code to modify SQL statements to dump their execution plans to a flat file, then it would be nice to have the ability, not only to generate with trace, but to “generate with stats” – which would, at the very least, switch “explain plans” on for all SQL statements. Also, those stats could contain “timing points” which could be inserted (possibly as new statements ???) into the code, and enabled through the “generate with stats” approach. These timing points would dump time information to a file, so that application engineers could see what was going on, and how long it took.

I understand that any collection of statistics modifies the way an application works, but used carefully could aid the performance engineer no end.

Disclaimer:
This kind of approach should NOT be used without the safety net of other methods of performance tuning – proper database design, proper configuration of machines etc etc!!!!