Suprtool for HP 3000
Database handyman
Also: Suprtool for HP-UX! Read about "Migrating Suprtool to HP-UX".
Turbo-charge your HP toolbox
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What's New in Suprtool?
Suprtool is constantly being improved and enhanced. Here are just 3 of the many recent new features:
$Edit for COBOL-Type Formatting |
Over the last fifteen years, Suprtool has become most famous for its super-fast extract and sorting capabilities. But it doesn't end there. Suprtool will handle many of your data manipulation tasks with ease - use Suprtool to extract, sort, read, write, copy, link, edit, convert, export, count, update, and the list goes on ... Just think of a task you'd like to perform on your data, and in all likelihood, there's a fast and easy way to do it with Suprtool.
Lightning Fast
Suprtool is famous for its speed in extracting and sorting data. It works on a variety of data sources; IMAGE databases, Allbase tables, MPE flat files, KSAM files, and tape files. The bigger the dataset and the smaller the subset of data selected, the greater the time reduction. Typical performance improvements are in the range of a 7:1 reduction of elapsed time compared to DBGET.Many Tools In One
Suprtool is so versatile that, in effect, you have many tools in one. Suprtool can read and write to almost any kind of file on the HP 3000 and you can use Suprtool daily as a general purpose utility to copy, select, and sort data quickly and conveniently. It also includes the following powerful modules that enable you to access the data in your databases.- Suprlink merges information from several datasets, tables or files. It is ideal for preparing simple reports quickly.
- Dbedit edits IMAGE/SQL database records interactively and also updates key values.
- Speed Demon enables your programs to read IMAGE/SQL data five times faster than IMAGE DBGET.
- Suprtool2 provides access to Suprtool from user-written programs.
- STExport creates files that can be exported to many applications on other platforms.
Easy Migration to HP-UX
Suprtool also runs on HP-UX, supporting the Oracle, Eloquence and Allbase databases. If you choose to move an application from the HP 3000 to the HP 9000, you will be glad to know that you can take your valuable Suprtool tasks with you! More information on Suprtool/UXSave Yourself Some Time
Suprtool will save you time by eliminating the need to write and maintain a multitude of custom programs. With Suprtool's set of simple yet powerful commands, you can often write a five- to ten-line Suprtool task that can replace hundreds of lines of repetitive and error-prone COBOL code. For example, let's clean up a database by archiving invoices that are more than one year old. With Suprtool, it takes only a few commands.
get invoices {IMAGE dataset}
item invoice-date,yyyymmdd {define data format}
if invoice-date<$date (*-1/*/*) {select entries}
output invhist {produce archive}
delete {delete selected}
xeq {execute commands}
Export Data Around The World
As computing environments become more diverse, your data needs to travel from place to place. Where do you need to move your HP 3000 data? To UNIX? to PC applications? How about the Internet? Or your Intranet? Suprtool's STExport function provides an easy solution to exporting your HP 3000 data. By controlling comma separators, quote or tab delimiters, leading zeros, and other parameters, you can use STExport to prepare your data so it can be used by other databases, such as MS Access or Oracle on many different platforms. Suprtool can even format your data into HTML tables which can be included on your web pages.Suprlink Links Multiple Files
Suprlink, one of the modules of Suprtool, merges multiple files and links records together based on a common data field. The following example adds product descriptions to a list of sales orders that contain only the product number.
input order_details
link product_master_info
output orders_with_descriptions
xeq
PowerHouse Users Love Suprtool
Suprtool is an impressive data extraction tool, whose strengths are speed and versatility. Quiz, the PowerHouse report writer, is terrific at producing complex reports. By combining Suprtool with Quiz, you can get the best of both worlds. Suprtool can do the speedy data selection and sorting, and Quiz can format the final report. Together they can reduce your reporting times to a fraction of what they are now."We use Suprtool all the time. It has helped us keep our upgrade costs down to a minimum. It also allows us to give the users the freedom to run a bunch of reports during the day that they were forced to run overnight before. I remember one Quiz report that took two hours to run before we added a Suprtool front-end. It went down to about five minutes after adding Suprtool. Just about all of my data extracts are now done using Suprtool and then I just use these files as inputs to all my programs."
[Todd Talsma, Sligh Furniture]
Suprtool Improves Other Tools
You can use Suprtool to maximize productivity and increase the effectiveness of other tools:- PowerHouse
- Speedware
- COBOL or any other 3GL
- Any tool that reads an MPE file
- IMAGE/V and IMAGE/SQL
- Allbase/SQL
- KSAM/V and KSAM/XL
- Third-party indexing
Allbase Access Module
The Allbase Access add-on module for Suprtool provides direct access to HP's Allbase database, allowing you to extract and sort directly from Allbase tables.Yearly Updates
At Robelle, we never stop working on Suprtool. Even as you read this, we are already working on a new version by incorporating the many features and ideas that Suprtool's thousands of users have requested.As a member of Hewlett-Packard's VAB Prep Program, Robelle has access to pre-release versions of IMAGE/SQL. This allows us to keep Suprtool in sync with IMAGE changes.