Hello,
 
First let me say that I'm honored to be posting to such a distinguished
list of HP 3000 professionals. Any help you can give will be greatly
appreciated!
 
It looks like we are going to start up a project to use ODBC and
IMAGE/SQL to allow our new shop-floor machine controller software (called
WonderWare) to talk to our IMAGE databases. The goal is to further
automate the flow of product through our plant by allowing the machines
to automatically upload quality and process data to the HP 3000 and
receive any needed data (such as new lot numbers, process data from other
machines, etc.) from the HP.
 
So far, it looks feasible. We have been writing test programs in Visual
Basic to  execute various queries in IMAGE/SQL via ODBC, and preliminary
performance and resource usage data looks good.
 
My question is, most broadly, are we heading into totally uncharted
territory? The implementation that we are proposing is (pardon the
buzzwords) mission-critical and enterprise-wide. It needs to work well,
and all the time! Is this too much to expect? Does anyone have any
experience with anything like this? Remember, I'm not talking about
pulling some records from a detail dataset into an Excel spreadsheet; I'm
talking about consistent, robust, two-way communication.
 
If anyone has any advice about potential pitfalls or appropriate ways to
proceed, please share!
 
Many thanks,
 
David Criswell
Sumitomo Electric Lightwave Corp.
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