AO Foundation

AOF automatically assist with the migration of the legacy ISAM-like database engine (with Record Level Access {RLA} or “native IO” DDS supported by CQE) constructs to the native SQL database engine (DDL and DML supported by SQE) incorporating sound risk and SDM/MDM management principles.

The migration process includes the complete recovery of all structural metadata and metadata (with or without underlying source code), and provides tools, processes and guidelines on how to “sanitize”, consolidate and gradually start improving and enriching the metadata.

Central to the AO renovation (modernization) roadmap and process, is our central Metadata Repository, or data dictionary, which forms the foundation of leveraging your heritage application components and artifacts.

Sanitize, consolidate and reduce heritage code base by up to 80%, reducing code complexity and improving code readability and maintainability.

AO® controls and guides the process of moving database validations and relationships out of the underlying heritage programming language (RPG code) and into the database engine with full central management.  This may translate into an up to 80%+ reduction of the heritage code base, thereby reducing complexity and improving code readability and maintainability.  A more expressive internal architecture facilitates improved application extensibility and agility.  The remaining code represents the business-unique logic.  These are the “gems” of business functionality which represent the application’s true competitive advantage.  AO® gradually facilitates the componentization of these discrete business rules, and leverages NATIVE, RPG rendered HTML to provide generic UI components for device agnostic user interactions.  These are used by programmers to seamlessly blend the back-end application renovation (modernization) processes for use with the new UI. AO® then facilitates the introduction of multi-tier architecture (or Model-View-Controller – MVC) in modernized applications.  This achieves separation of code in the database (M), user interface (V) and business logic (C) resulting in improved application agility and maintainability.

Full or modular packaging options are available:

We (IBM i users) have probably the most advanced commercial implementation of the DB2 database at our disposal, yet most installations continue to use it primarily the way we used to do things in the early 1990’s. As a result, most of the advances in the database engine on this wonderful platform have passed us by.

By utilizing the massive improvements in the underlying database engine technology (data validations, constraints, triggers), we can reduce your code base by on average 80% (depending on coding standards and techniques) and at the same time facilitate dramatic potential performance improvements, whilst providing a sound foundation to gradually improve the underlying rendering of that functionality, based on ROI.

This foundation facilitated by using AO Foundation and the SQL engine, is then used to gradually start to sanitize your heritage database, consolidate the database and underlying Metadata and then to start an enrichment process of the Metadata, using the new Open Access (OA) Metadata Open Standard.

It is extremely important to recognize that if your installation has not yet adopted the SQL (DDL/SQE) engine as your primary DB2 for i interface and is still primarily using the ISAM (DDS/CQE) engine for database access, you are using the leading high volume commercial OLTP platform severely shackled and constrained.