Many organizations need to move from Adabas to relational database architectures in order to reduce operating costs and make data more accessible to their users.

Adopting up-to-date industry standards for data management facilitates the integration of mainframe applications with applications running on open system platforms.

Applications built using Adabas continue to perform essential tasks but these applications need to be upgraded to reflect current practices and to solve problems relating to availability of the required skill sets.

Migrating Adabas to DB2, Oracle and SQL Server

The complex process of migrating existing databases to newer Database Management Systems has been automated by the MOST OnTarget migration tool. The OnTarget migration process includes these steps:

• Design of the new target database by analyzing existing database structures and proposing a Relational Data Model.
• Customer intervention to incorporate changes to the proposed data model based on specific customer related constraints.
• RDBMS infrastructure generation to ensure the creation of an efficient, well-designed database.
• Migration program generation to produce the scripts and programs that will migrate data from the old to the new database.
• Application Conversion to replace COBOL, NATURAL or PL/I code with the required SQL commands.
• Data Bridging to schedule a phased migration of data that does not adversely impact application availability at any time during the migration process.

OnTarget‘s knowledge base takes into account the unique structures that exist in Adabas data models and generates functionally equivalent structures in the new RDBMS.

The 3-layer architecture includes a Data Access Layer through which all RDBMS access is channeled. This facilitates future maintenance of the migrated application.