Fall is here, so it must be time for CA World 2016!
As I write this month’s blog for CA IDMS™, we are finalizing details for CA World ’16. We are thrilled to provide another opportunity this year to provide education and technical sessions across four days plus demonstrate the newest capabilities of this remarkable DBMS powerhouse. We have 15 tech sessions featuring subject expert speakers from CA as well as customer speakers from CAIXA and British Telecom.
If you are attending CA World you’ll have an opportunity to spend quality time with Product Management and Engineering: Sheila Miller, John Siraco and myself, Dave Ross. We look forward to seeing you!
Can’t attend CA World ’16? No worries – check out these CA IDMS Videos
We have posted several new product videos on the CA IDMS homepage. There is no charge to view these videos and it’s quite convenient to view right from your desk. Additionally, we plan to make many of the CAWorld ’16 presentations available for download. Check back regularly on this IDMS Community page for these new postings as they become available.
And now for this month’s Tech Tip: CA IDMS - It Can Do More Today than Ever Before!
In case you haven’t heard - we’re happy to announce the availability of CA IDMS Version 19. This latest release provides even more capabilities that can help you access and deliver data faster, easier and helps you more easily support the development of critical business apps that your customers need.
Customers have long taken advantage of the outstanding performance and reliability of CA IDMS to support mission critical applications on which they literally run their businesses. But more than performance and reliability is needed in today’s application economy, users need to unlock the value in their data and applications for analytics, web, and mobile applications, and need to address the skills shortage as experiences mainframe technicians retire.
We have found that many users we talk with believe that the way to do this is to convert to another DBMS, either on the mainframe or another platform. This can be a difficult, time consuming, and expensive process and can result in applications that do the same thing, but with less reliability, poorer performance, and higher costs.
A Better Approach…
CA IDMS Version 19 provides capabilities that allow users to continue to run their proven applications while enabling access to the data for new applications [Figure1]. Developers can use SQL, Java, and .NET to build applications that access data in existing databases, enabling access from web applications and mobile devices, no migration or conversion is needed.
These capabilities enable data to be easily accessed by data analytics and business intelligence tools. Exposing existing databases as relational tables allows programmers to use their current skills and minimizes the need for deep knowledge of legacy database programming.
CA IDMS users can develop web services on the application server of their choice - such as Apache Tomcat - using Java and the powerful frameworks available on these platforms. They can use JDBC or ODBC and SQL to access data directly from existing databases, without the need to use legacy database access commands, and use SQL procedures to call existing business logic written in COBOL and other mainframe languages. This is valuable in leveraging your investment in these applications and enabling their reuse in new web services that are important to keeping your business running and productive.
[Figure 1] CA IDMS 19.0 (now available for download on CA Support Online) provides direct support to consume and provide web services, without requiring an intermediate application server, and enhances use of SQL with existing network databases.
Is CA IDMS Version 19 right for your business?
Each business is different, for sure, but customer comments about their experience have been very positive about the 1-2 hour upgrade process. In fact, there are no reported client cases related to CA IDMS 19.0 upgrade process:
- “Smooth as can be”
- “IR is solid… The number of SYSMODS APPLYd was 24, which is quite impressive to have that few in number, unlike DB2 which averages C2:2 PTF’s per day. Kudus to the IDMS support team, they are world class!”
- And while not DIRECTLY related to Version 19 upgrade, this comment speaks volumes: “We are really impressed by the amount of workload that IDMS offloads to zIIP processors. It seems so far that around 55% of the workload is running on zIIP. That is fantastic!”
Whatever your current release level (and by the way - you CAN skip releases to upgrade to Version 19), we recommend users plan their technology strategy and consider upgrading to Version 19 at the appropriate time. Most important: WE ARE HERE TO HELP YOU! Our friendly Support Team is here to help, answer questions or make suggestions.
To learn more about CA IDMS Version 19, view this Communities Webcast from August 22.
What are your thoughts? For customers that have already upgraded to CA IDMS Version 19.0, what tips and experience do you have to share with this ? We’d love to hear your thoughts.