James Trudeau writes:
So amongst all the other pains of transitioning from a 3000 to a
9000 :-((  I keep having cows about what to do with the 9 years
of offsite archive data we've got to deal with.  It's all on DDSII
tapes in MPE STORE format.  It consists of TurboImage databases
COBOL source code and executables.  Total of ummm 550-600GB.

If I can get it into some kind of reportable format on the 9000 I
can dispense with everything but the TurboImage data.  Keeping
the 3000 after migration and loading up the tapes one at a time
and going through the same process we use for the current data
is not an option.

The stuff does not have to be online, it just needs to be more or
less readily accessable.  It's the freakin' auditors ya know.
[clh:]  I'm not sure how you handle "versions" of your DB.  By this I mean
if you make a change to a Dataset (add a field, eg), you must change the
program(s) that access that dataset.  If you have 9+ years of archived
data, can the "current version" of the program use the 9 year old data?  Do
you have the 9 year old program?  Examining this issue may result in a
reduction of the amount of data it you need to retain...

Moving on: you state that you've already eliminated the need to maintain
the migrated source and executables, which makes perfect sense.  The
problem, then, is that you would like to access TurboImage data from an MPE
STORE tape.  Even if you could somehow "read" the tape from a different OS,
you would still have to emulate the Image Intrinsics on that different OS
to actually read the data!

You say you don't need the data; your requirement seems to be "keep the
auditors happy".  Perhaps you could make some arrangement with a solution
provider in your area -- either someone in the channel, or someone in the
"business continuation/disaster recovery" arena -- to provide a box on a
contingency basis...

Carl Hughes