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IS HIS actually necessary?

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Rob Banfield

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May 5, 2006, 9:38:54 AM5/5/06
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Say we have a medium-sized enterprise consisting of 3 or 4 sites with a
few hundred users in various countries. A single DB2/iSeries server is
established to hold all enterprise data and ERP systems, and the users
in each of the localities need to access the data held on the central
server.

Access to the data will either be via ERP clients local to each user
(Win2000/XP machines), or from home-grown windows apps (which, at the
moment, access MS SQL Server 7/2000 via ODBC, or OLEDB, or ADO).

The question is, do we actually _NEED_ HIS in this scenario; and if so,
does it _NEED_ to be integrated into MS SQL Server 7/2000 ? Or would a
good ODBC / OLE DB / ADO driver (on each client m/c?) be sufficient?

HYCH,
Rob

Neil Pike

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May 6, 2006, 3:24:56 AM5/6/06
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Rob,

The short answer is no.

The longer answer is...

Ultimately with iSeries all you need is an OLE-DB/ODBC driver. You can get
one of these from IBM, or MS, or a.n.other 3d party.

If you wanted/needed to use the MS one, then you would need HIS licenses, but
you wouldn't actually need HIS installed as such - you'd just need the OLE-DB
driver off the HIS CD.

On the SQL Server integration, again there's no need to integrate. But if you
wanted to do replication, or linked-server queries etc. that's all perfectly
possible - SQL Server would be configured to query DB/2 via a DB/2 ole-db
driver.

Ultimately it's down to what applications you have, where the data is, whether
you're going to be replacing/moving/duplicating the data in DB/2 or SQL Server.
What is the business driver behind all this? After all - if your data is
currently in SQL Server, why not centralise on a large SQL Server instance
instead? Far less application changes to make that way!!!

Neil Pike. Protech Computing Ltd
Microsoft SNA/HIS MVP
https://mvp.support.microsoft.com/communities/mvp.aspx

Rob Banfield

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May 6, 2006, 8:17:37 AM5/6/06
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Neil,

The short answer to why the data will in future be centralised on a
remote DB2 server, rather than locally on SQL Server is that our
corporate masters would have it that way. So we need to adapt and make
changes to our programs. The DB2 OLE-DB/ODBC driver seems the way to
go, much simpler than setting up HIS, and would involve the least
amount of disruption to the programs as possible. It would also give me
more time to port them to VS 2005/C# !

Rob

Neil Pike

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May 8, 2006, 3:18:28 AM5/8/06
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Good old corporate policy...

fyi - if you're running SQL Server then you should look into the "cut-down"
DB/2 ole-db driver that's downloadable as an add-on to MS SQL 2005. It's from
the HIS team, and is cut-down only in so much as the LU6.2 (HIS/SNA) stuff
isn't there - it only uses tcp-ip, which is all you need anyway.

Neil Pike. Protech Computing Ltd

Rob Banfield

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May 8, 2006, 10:31:08 AM5/8/06
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That's a good tip Neil, BUT we will probably have to have a driver on
each workstation and query the DB2 DB via this. DataDirect seem to have
a good product (and, looking to the future, a managed ADO driver for
.NET), but maybe we'll get our drivers free as part of some package
from corporate (some hopes...)

Rob

Neil Pike

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May 9, 2006, 4:46:49 AM5/9/06
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If they have some sort of "enterprise" licensing deal with IBM, then they may
well...


> but maybe we'll get our drivers free as part of some package
> from corporate (some hopes...)
>
> Rob
>

Neil Pike. Protech Computing Ltd

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