SLC via DBMonster.com wrote:
Hello I'm a newbie to this and I need help, please
My question is, we currently have a IDMS db and will be converting to DB2.
What are the things I should do? The IDMS has not been documented very well,
and there are a number of duplicate fields. I was thinking about
documenting all the tables with fields attributes, and documenting the fields
to the 150 screens in this program. We also that about doing a CRUD matrix
to see what it does currently. Does anyone have any other suggestions...
PLEASE....All suggestions are appreciated. :))
We just went though this last year with a very large database. Due to
the size and complexity and time we had a third party vendor do it for
us. Their name was SBS (now ateras). They can do just the database,
the database and the application or just the application. We chose both
the application and the database. We converted ADSO programs to
CICS/COBOL programs that access a DB2 database. It works, but now we
have a network database implemented on a relational DBMS. It does cause
some interesting performance challenges.
You really have to know your data and the database to make an informed
decision on how to convert this data. You can no longer have group
elements like you did in IDMS, the data element name sizes are different
(IDMS allows larger names), and there are many other issues. Things
like Date data type did not exist in IDMS. The concept of a null column
did not exist in IDMS. The Optional Manual set does not exist in DB2.
It is really a big job depending upon how many record types you have.
The actual conversion of the data was not easy either. Our database had
around 250 records in it (IDMS). I had to run over 2500 jobs to do the
conversion. We ended up unloading the data from IDMS and putting into a
format that I could use the DB2 load utility. The real kicker was that
I had only 12 hours to convert everything (including the application!).
Ateras really came through for us. They have a product called DB
Shuttle that takes the schema in IDMS and converts it to DB2. It does
not do it in a vacuum, however. Many decisions have to be made about
the format of the data you are converting to.
Good Luck.
