Leonard conveniently asks:
> Has anyone considered the following type of scenario:
>
> It is September 1, 2009. A letter arrives from the Sales Tax
> Department of [insert your favorite] State. They wish to
> perform an audit of you sales tax collections for 2006. Your
> back-up tapes are sitting safely in some off-site storage
> facility, but where will you restore these files? What
> software will you use to create the reports required to
> satisfy this audit request? What staff will you have with
> the skills to use this data? etc.

Well, of course you would buy a copy of Rosetta Store "the MPE :RESTORE
for non-MPE platforms" from Orbit Software and Allegro Consultants,
which will let you :RESTORE your MPE backup tapes onto your HP-UX,
Linux, and Windows systems as needed.

Rosetta knows how to read the raw MPE files off of tape, and it knows
how to extract the data from those files in a form that's actually
useful on a non-MPE system.

For example, you can ask to restore an Image database from tape and what
comes off of the tape is an Eloquence database!  Or restore your
database into Oracle, generic SQL, XML, CSV, ASCII, BINARY, etc.  It can
do the same for your KSAM files, all your text files (including Qedit
format files, your ordinary BINARY data files from COBOL and so on.

For files that include their own meta-data (Image, SD, KSAM (partially)
etc.) we pick up the record definition automatically.  For things like
ordinary BINARY files, there is a Windows GUI interface that lets you
define the record layout of the file and all the processing
specifications you want to apply to the file.  So you can redefine
record layouts and field types, change the output type and destination
for each file (or class of files), have byte-swapping performed for
restores on little-endian platforms, etc.

There are two main uses for the Rosetta Store product.  The first is the
active migration of data from your current 3000 environment to your new
environment.  You can take your nightly backup tape and put it in the
new system and have Rosetta re-migrate all your data every night if you
like.  Once you've defined all the processing and data transformations
for your files once, the rest of the process is automatic and can be run
with no user input.

Using one tool (Rosetta) you can handle all the processing that would
ordinarily require you to write an extract procedure for every file and
dataset, a transport mechanism to move the extracted files to the new
system, and transform/load programs for each file and dataset on the new
system.  Since the extract mechanism is simply an ordinary MPE or
Backup+ :STORE operation, you really don't need to do any work on the
MPE side at all.

The second major use for the product is to recover data from your many
years of archival backup tapes.  So when they ask to audit your sales
tax records from five years ago, just stick the appropriate tape in and
ask Rosetta to get you back the files and datasets you need in the form
that's most convenient, such as an Eloquence or SQL database that you
can query, or simply XML or Comma Separated (CSV) format for loading
into Excel for analysis.

Or, if the reports you want exist on your backup tapes as spoolfiles, we
can extract these spoolfiles into ASCII files that you can explore
(getting them to print exactly the way that they would have on an MPE
system may not be trivial however).

The first release of Rosetta Store is expected to ship around the end of
the year.

I do see that we've been remiss in getting the product information up on
the web now that HP World is over and the product is officially
announced.  I'll see if we can get this corrected shortly :-)

G.

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