April 2006 Volume 10, Number 2

Product Spotlight – TurnOver PDQ

By Paul Rogers, Quality Assurance Manager

TurnOver PDQ was designed and created to substantially reduce the business application downtime associated with large data file changes. It continues to earn its name by Promoting Data Quickly, even for customers with multi-million- and multi-billion-record files that have an extensive amount of update activity associated with them.

The TurnOver PDQ product first became available back in 1998, in time to assist quite a few customers with their Y2K file conversion issues. And even after the Y2K hysteria subsided, it has continued to be an integral part of many customers’ day-to-day operations for addressing file conversion and reorganization issues.

The core technology behind PDQ marries the strengths of Lakeview’s MIMIX/Promoter product with features developed by SoftLanding Systems. This has created a unique product that allows you to convert, or reorganize, database files with a minimal amount of interruption to application availability. Most customers report that they have saved 90 to 99 percent of their anticipated downtime by introducing the PDQ product into their environments.

Why use PDQ?

An important consideration, and one of the major benefits of using PDQ, is that your business exposure is limited should something go wrong with any PDQ process. I will explain this in more detail by walking you through a typical PDQ process.

The PDQ process creates a duplicate, empty copy of your production file (with database file changes, if applicable) in a staging library. It then proceeds to read records from the production file and write those records to the duplicate copy. This process could be as simple as bypassing deleted records to reorganize a file, or as complicated as converting data to a new format. While this process is taking place, your production users continue to access the file at will. PDQ journals each of their record changes and periodically converts the new journal entries to the new format. Only after the PDQ process has successfully copied all the records does PDQ temporarily deny your users access to the file when, at your request, it converts any remaining journaled changes and swaps the existing production file with the newly converted or reorganized file.

If during the record processing phase there is any kind of interruption (such as a hardware problem, power outage, subsystem termination, or the like) all you have lost is the time spent processing. Because no changes have yet been made to the production file, you can easily re-start the process.

The comfort of total control

This brings up another point about the file swapping process. For example, let’s say that you start a PDQ process on Monday morning, anticipating that it will be done in time to swap the files late Saturday night. Unfortunately, due to the speed of your system or the amount of processing that has occurred during the week, the PDQ process is still running and has not yet reached 100% before that Saturday night window of opportunity arrives. Instead of cancelling the process and restarting it again on Monday morning and hoping that it will finish in time, you would simply let the process continue to run until the next Saturday evening window arrives. Even if the PDQ process reaches 100% completion before that time, you have complete control over when the process enters the file swapping phase.

Another factor that lowers the risk of any database conversion is use of a solid change management system. The PDQ product is fully integrated into SoftLanding Systems’ TurnOver Change Management System, offering you the best features from two award-winning products to make your life a whole lot easier.

Many of our customers have come forward with statements about how the PDQ product saved them considerable downtime. Here is one customer’s statement that shows how the PDQ process, coupled with TurnOver Change Management, made a truly significant impact:

“43.5 million records, 145 associated logicals, 50,000 updates, and 1,070 associated program objects were initially estimated to take 36 hours of downtime to complete. PDQ enabled us to do it with just 30 minutes of downtime!”

Next time you are faced with either a database file conversion or just a simple reorganization of a file that always seems to be in use, consider PDQ! Call our Sales Department at +44 (0)1442 293100 to request additional information or a free demonstration.

TurnOver and TurnOver PDQ are registered trademarks of SoftLanding Systems, Inc. MIMIX/Promoter is a registered trademark of Lakeview Technology, Inc.

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