BRUNATA Hurth

Using tcACCESS® to Access DL/1 Data

Brunata - Changing data into information BRUNATA is a corporation with 450 employees and approximately 700 contractors, responsible for the consumption based settlement of heating costs and water consumption costs for landlords and tenants. In addition, BRUNATA develops systems and manufactures devices to register the consumption of energy and water in residential and business buildings.

BRUNATA had a goal to migrate all production data currently stored in hierarchical DL/I databases to the relational DB2 database. The most important tool to successfully complete that task was tcACCESS.

BRUNATA uses an IBM 9672-RA6 (G5) running z/VM 3.1 and VSE/ESA 2.3. The production data is stored in DL/I databases. Based on the increasing demands on the IT division to cope with the Internet/Intranet, emerging new technologies (i.e. mobile data entry devices and systems), management requirements for data warehouse solutions, as well as the fact that the existing database was designed more than 10 years ago and was extremely inflexible to meet today’s’ challenging requirements; this all lead to the decision to replace the DL/I based data model with IBM’s DB2 relational database. Minor technical points support the decision: the resource-consuming reorganization runs of the database as well as the fact, that nearly no tools for DL/I are available on the software market any more.

For BRUNATA, the decision for DB2 has far-reaching consequences: A new data model must be designed, all application programs must be modified and the existing programming team must learn to think relational. To put this decision into action, BRUNATA decided to gradually migrate individual projects and applications. Although this decision resulted in a longer migration period, a longer need for synchronizing the “old“ and the “new“ data platforms, it also means a faster productive transfer to the new technology. To support the migration process and to ensure a reliable synchronization of the data, BRUNATA started looking for a software tool, which allows to access and join the classical mainframe resources DL/I, VSAM and DB2 using the relational SQL language and which could be used with stand-alone utilities as well as being called by an API from in-house application programs.

The decision was made to purchase tcACCESS. During the trial period, several proto-types were developed and tested to migrate the DL/I databases to DB2. It came in extremely handy, that tcACCESS offered a feature to logically unload DL/I databases using SQL language (including JOINs) and to create a file which could be directly used as input to the DB2 Loader Utility. This tcACCESS feature can be used with utilities or it can be implemented into in-house programs using the supplied API. This was exactly what BRUNATA was looking for. Even the confrontation of tcACCESS with BRUNATA’s home grown date formats which also acted as DL/I segment keys was easily solved using the standard field exit capability of tcACCESS.

“We have been convinced by the ease of use of the product, its richness in functions, the good performance and the excellent support provided “
states Lothar Stein, Chief Technology Officer.

“The integration of the tcACCESS API functions into our existing CPG programs was a piece of cake!“
adds Ulrich Schmitz, Application Programmer and Database Specialist.

“We are convinced that we made the right decision with tcACCESS to set the course for the right future direction of our IT department.“
- Lothar Stein - Chief Technology Officer.