CASE STUDY ON SYSTEM MIGRATION

MOVING TO CLIENT/SERVER

More and more companies are discovering the many benefits of moving
their systems to a distributed client/server environment. But getting there
is not easy. You need to move your existing systems into this new
environment as quickly as possible - and with minimal interruption to your
company's business operations.

UNIF/X has extensive experience helping companies complete large-
scale system migrations. We have developed proprietary rapid migration
methods and tools which enable us to automatically and simultaneously
convert data and applications - saving customers millions on their
"downsizing" and "rightsizing" projects.

CASE STUDY

The following describes an example of a system migration project
completed for a major Wall Street Financial Publisher.

The scope of the project was to migrate the company's data processing
department (over 500,000 lines of code) from a mainframe system to a
distributed client/server environment using UNIX, Sybase, and C++. The
project was successfully completed in less than four months - 25% of the
time that the client had originally estimated to complete the job.

The existing applications were running on IBM mainframes using a 4GL-
like language called NOMAD. Since NOMAD is a functional language
consisting of high level constructs such as LIST, WRITE, DEFINE, SELECT,
STRING MANIPULATIONS, and CONTROL STATEMENTS, C++ was
chosen as the target language. C++ can simulate these constructs (which
do not exist in a procedural language such as C), even where the
functional language's semantics change dynamically in run time.

After carefully mapping the data, our people developed a unique
compiler to accept NOMAD files and produce C++ programs that
interface with and manipulate SQL in Sybase. This incorporated a
specially developed parser to relate the very different syntactic and
semantic operations of the languages, and an object library to implement
the NOMAD constructs. The parser called the object library and applied
sophisticated techniques to convert the hierarchical database structure of
NOMAD to the resulting relational database structure of Sybase.

The project was completed on time, saving the customer over $5 Million.

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