Accessing MfgPro Progress Database or TIMS Appgen database.

[GavMagill]

Hi All

I have been asked whether DS can access data from MFGPRO or TIMS applications. These are application packages used by a manufacturing division of the company I am working with.

I am told they store data in a Progress 9.1C database and a database called Appgen respectively.

Has anyone used DS to access a Progress database or Appgen database. If you have, could you tell me which make of ODBC driver was used (presuming connection was made via ODBC) and/or any gotcha's to watch out for.

Thanks and regards
Gavin Magill
DataStage Developer
Oxygen Business Solutions
Carter Holt Harvey Limited
DDI (+649 636 1857)

[1stpoint]

ODBC is the method by which to accesses a Progress database. As far as I know it supports SQL-92 so you should be ok.

[kduke]

Progress has a very loose table structure like Universe. They can have arrays in a single column like multivalues. The ODBC drivers used to be very slow and sometimes blow up on these arrays but that was years ago. I have never used it with DataStage. It was fairly easy for a progress developer to create a tab delimited file for us. We bulk load this in Oracle and use PLSQL to manipulate the data. It worked very well. I think it still works this way. We created this DW in 1996.

Well good luck. I hope you find a good solution. I would just try ODBC. What do have to lose?

[amitdurve]

I have used odbc to connect to progress db version 5 (i think). We had to install the progress client on the DS server. This installs "merant driver". Use this driver to make the connection in odbc.
We had to finally stop using this way of extraction and start using csv files generated by the progress guys as extraction time was unusually high.
All the best