Migration of Pick Basic Application to .NET using IBM UniVerse® and UNIOBJECT

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Company Profile

 

The organization is a distributor of medical and surgical supplies for virtually every recognizable name brand manufacturer in the healthcare industry. The web site offers its members the ability to search their product offerings, view contract pricing, place orders on-line, create a customized "favorites" page and review the status of previously placed orders.

 

They offer this convenient and efficient internet-based way of doing business, a traditional "bricks-and-mortar" medical and surgical supply distributor

Business Situation

 

The company (pharma and medicinal) is maintaining all transactions between his all suppliers and venders and warehouse’s by Using Software MDS (Medical Distribution System) and also MDS maintains all raw stocks on his warehouses.

Major hurdles:

 

• Suppliers Information.
• Vender Information.
• Warehouse Information.
• Stock Management.

Technical Situation

 

Today’s software development environment boasts of scalability and platform dependent spectrum of technologies, complexity and size. In every case, the software is transformed from source code written by developers into an application that can be utilized by end-users.

 

Client is the industry’s choice for software to help provide the infrastructure to transform raw data into consistent, accurate and reliable corporate information. It can access most databases and file formats and profile the results accurately as well as to greatly reduce the time and effort to move and integrate data.

 

The main effort was transition of UNIX based application to a Windows based application interacting with an UNIX database. This Product had a legacy code of distributed components and dynamic libraries which he wanted under one executable with unbreakable security. IBM UniVerse® is an extended relational (MultiValue™) data server optimized for embedding in superior solutions and is ideal for markets which target small to medium businesses, as well as larger enterprises.

 

• Robust high-availability capabilities including point-in-time recovery and the ability to recover a single record from a specified file
• Efficient encryption of data at rest with flexible encryption key management Enhanced licensing and authorization process offers streamlined configuration while protecting licensed assets
• Highly scalable, low-cost data management system with many innovative features
• Support for Web services client protocols including XML and SOAP
• New U2 Web Services Development tool with a configurable SOAP server to quickly create and deploy Web services from BASIC subroutines and UniVerse® queries via the industry-standard Web Services Description Language (WSDL)
• Includes UNIOBJECTs for .NET -- a native, scalable, high performance API for developing in the Microsoft .NET framework
• Robust features for high availability, failover and data replication available IBM Web Sphere MQ support
• National Language Support (NLS) using Unicode standard Transaction management with support for nested transactions
• Broad support for open standards-based SQL interfaces such as JDBC, OLEDB and ODBC

Solution

 

MDS Software is developed in Pick Basic (Language) and UniVerse® Data base. Pick Basic and UniVerse® database is UNIX base database. The application was transitioned to a Windows based application. For windows based application to connect to the UniVerse® Database, we required an intermediate object, UNIOBJECT. The transition was done from the application made on Pick Basic to .NET and the database remained UniVerse® database with UNIOBJECT for connectivity. UNIOBJECT worked as middle man between UniVerse® database and .Net application.

 

UNIOBJECT provides functionality like SQL SERVER to insert data in to database. UniVerse® database is multi value file system. It’s Different from RDBMS. So in the UniVerse® database separate each row with a special character and each column are separate with a special character.

So Display the reports on window base application from UniVerse® Database, we use Uniobject as intermediate layer.

 

Benefits

 

• By Using UNIOBJECT we are able to Display data in windows base application also.
• By UNIOBJECT we are able to manipulate Universe database with Window base applications (Like in .NET, Visual Basic).
• UniVerse® Database Uses Flat File system to store data in database.
• Multi-value architecture requires fewer tables whose sizes are dynamically managed by the data server. UniVerse® sites require less data server administration with smaller sites having little to no resources allocated.
• Shortened development cycles are possible due to ease of data server design along with a tightly integrated development environment.
• UniVerse® supports a broad range of information management applications with excellent performance and reliability. As a result, a large number of industry solution providers use UniVerse® to develop and support their applications. This allows the client to more quickly satisfy their requirements by buying, rather than building, solutions.