<rant on>
![Wink :wink:](./images/smilies/icon_wink.gif)
How long do you think DataStage will still live and in which form? Most of us hope that DataStage will be around for a long time, but what if it isn't: compared to Oracle the income of Ascential is a 'rounding error'.
- Did anyone already think of a migration path in case DataStage ceases to exist, I made an estimate of the amount of effort to convert all 'our' DataStage jobs to some other tool (I based myself on a migration to Informatica), with around 10000 DataStage jobs management kind of dropped from their seats when I gave them my estimate.
- Are you using all functionality of DataStage, or only the minimal amount to get the job done. If you only have SQL input queries being run and output just being insert/updated in another database, chances are large that moving to another tool is a 1-to-1 migration.
- Will DataStage still exist in the current form in 5 years or will Ascential try to do something as SeeBeyond, which did quite a paradigm shift going from their own internal language in one version to using Java as scripting language in their next version. I personally feel UV is at the end of its life and don't know what will become of it in 5 years time, on the other hand I don't see an easy migration path for DataStage to use something else, as DataStage is only a 'shell' above UV converting GUI jobs in BASIC code.
- Wouldn't developing your own little framework e.g. in perl or java and using that to make jobs be cheaper in the long run? If you don't need a SAP interface, ... You would need some very technical people to get the thing going, but at 100K+ DataStage licensing costs... Why are there no good open source initiatives for this?
<rant off>
Ogmios