Archiving solution for BPCS

 Press Release
New from emerging U.K Software Company Small Blue comes an archiving solution 
for BPCS users. Small Blue was formed by Clare Holtham and Sally Bosman, who 
between them have over 20 years experience of BPCS and the AS/400, having 
worked for SSA and IBM. They aim to provide high quality solutions in the 
midrange arena.

At last you can now archive old BPCS data and dramatically improve online 
transaction processing.  The archived data can be stored offline, or kept on 
disk for users to query. Archived data can be accessed via the normal BPCS 
enquiry programs. You want to archive your data periodically, but other than a 
few purges at month-end, BPCS offers no comprehensive archiving function. You 
could write your own, however the Small Blue solution takes care of all the 
BPCS file dependencies so that you don't end up with 'orphaned' data.


After two or three years of live running with BPCS, transactions are slowing 
down and performance is sluggish. In particular V5 and V6 BPCS applications use 
SQL extensively, and SQL performance is affected by the size of the files and 
the number of deleted records. In fact SQL may read through every deleted 
record in a file, and even without SQL a huge orders file will take several 
seconds to open.

 Perhaps after a year or so of processing you believe that your workload has 
increased beyond the capacity of your I-Series, and you will have to spend 
megabucks to upgrade the hardware? Maybe not - archiving a substantial amount 
of BPCS data could lower the CPU workload below the pain threshold.


Companies have used the Archiving solution to allow them to restart the BPCS 
order numbers after they reached 900,000 or more. Users can still interrogate 
the orders from the archived sequence.

Small Blue Archiving is.
 ·         Easy and quick to install

·         Simple to set-up and use

·         Can be run from the menus or from a job scheduler

·         Respects the integrity of the BPCS file relationships

·         Batch archiving optimised for performance

·         Archived data available for user enquiries via standard BPCS

·         User files, extension files etc can be added to the archive - you 
simply specify the file names and the linking field names

 ·         ZPD file archive allows archiving by document type

·         User profile archiving across the entire system

·         You choose which dates to use for archiving - some BPCS files have 
many possible dates, for example order shipped date, order entered date, and so 
on.

 ·         Authorisation option allows you to set which options a user can 
access

For further information please visit our website www.smallblue.co.uk or contact 
Dave Oberlé on +44 1737 789777 (Dave.Oberle@smallblue.co.uk).