Hi, all, Something came up yesterday that I thought was worth sharing, as I'm concerned about it. This looks like a wave of the future and it makes change control on mainframes a potential nightmare if other vendors do this.
I just had a meeting yesterday with a vendor who was touting their software installation GUI for the mainframe. It uses FTP under the covers to install a listener/service program/whatever to interface with their database nucleus to web enable all sorts of nifty processes. In the vaporware version in the demo they showed how simple it was to install and begin joining data elements together in a GUI and allow ad hoc inquiries in a "point and click and report" kind of way. So a DBA or a developer could get a CD in the mail for a trial, load it on their PC, install this puppy in an hour (vendor estimate) and, at this site, they could join all vehicle records to all service records for three years in a matter of seconds in the GUI and download gigs of data to their PC until it gakked on the data volume. Meanwhile sysprogs would be fire fighting spikes on I/O and CPU for the nucleus. Customers would be complaining about response time. Management would be asking "what changed?" and all would be going on outside of standard SMP/E software installs. If you are a DBA with rights to FTP and rights to update loadlibs you would be authorized to install this. If you were trusted with data access you could run this sort of ad hoc query. When I asked about if there was an SMP/E install procedure, they looked at me with a quizzical look and said, "sure we cut SMF records." When I tried to explain the differences between SMP/E and SMF they were lost. Has anyone else seen this sort of product installation method? Peter Duffy Consultant, Operations Support - Mainframe/Distributed/Network __________________________________________NISSAN NORTH AMERICA Information Systems Department Gardena, CA, USA 310-771-6472 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
