Specialist services for Ingres and OpenROAD users

All database systems need time and effort to support and maintain. This often ties up valuable internal resources that you would like to be able to use on other projects.

We have extensive experience of taking over the support and maintenance of existing Ingres systems in a carefully managed process controlled through Luminary's SystemCare methodology.

Many OpenROAD applications are starting to look dated, with a Windows 98 look and feel. Yet the applications may be functionally rich and serve a mission critical business purpose. A cosmetic makeover may be all that is required to make the applications more acceptable to users and to make them integrate better visually with other apps.

Luminary has developed tools and techniques for applying a brand new 'system identity' to even the largest OpenROAD app in a fraction of the time required by manual methods.

Deployment of large, monolithic OpenROAD applications can cause a real headache. Re-structuring an application so it can be deployed as an OpenROAD eClient can deliver real savings, due to the automated and seamless way the eClient handles application updates. This can completely relieve the burden of patch management for the OpenROAD runtime installation, thus greatly simplifying the deployment of application changes.

We have extensive experience of working with both large and small applications to exploit the deployment benefits offered by this technology.

One of the key challenges when integrating disparate systems is how to re-use as much of your existing application logic as possible, but still allow new systems and new technologies to gain access to this valuable resource.

One approach we have used successfully with customers such as the U.S. Gov't and DS Limited, is to take an existing monolithic application (whether written in ABF or OpenROAD) and split the logic out into layers for presentation, business logic and data access. Through a combination of using the OpenROAD Application Server, careful design of the interfaces between these layers, and using a set of custom-built migration tools, we can rapidly expose the business logic as fully fledged Services for use by a range of technologies such as Java, .NET, the Internet, or other OpenROAD applications. This gives you a fast, low-risk, incremental approach for re-using and rejuvenating applications that would otherwise be consigned to the 'legacy' bin.

ABF applications often contain a rich set of business logic that has been carefully developed over many years. However, re-using any of that logic can be difficult, without re-writing it, due to the limited interfaces supported by ABF. We have helped customers move these applications forwards without having to rewrite them, either by transforming the entire application at once, or by incrementally rescuing ABF and migrating it to technologies such as OpenROAD. The very similar syntax makes migration to OpenROAD straightforward, while its open interfaces make it easy to re-use newly exposed 4GL SOA logic from JEE and .NET technologies.