The situation:
I have been tasked with pulling the data out of an old and mostly
undocumented 3rd-party D3 system running on AIX.

I have learned everything I know about Pick in the last 24 hours.

The system is running AIX 4.3. The odbcsvr daemon says that it is
version 7.1.x.S23, I presume that the pick VM itself is of the same
vintage.

I have root on the AIX box.

There seems to be only one valid pick login, call it "user1". I have a
(hand-written) list of about a dozen logins and passwords. They are not
AIX logins. They may be Pick users or they may be from a totally
unrelated project. I have randomly tried a few and they don't seem to
work with Pick.

What I think that I want to do:
1. Run d3tcl
2. Use a Pick command to get a list of pick files. (How to do?)
3. Use the export command to dump each pick file to a unix file. (I
think that I've got this worked out, based on what I have read in the
command reference PDF that I downloaded from Raining Data.)

My current stumbling block:
When I run d3tcl, I am presented with the menu screen for the pick
application and I do not have an opportunity to enter any sort of Pick
command. For example, the following command, which I believe would
print out a list of Pick users, takes me into the 3rd-party Pick
program:
d3tcl list-users

I am *guessing* that the pick user has some sort of auto-run macro that
brings up the Pick program. Can this be disabled? Can I find a
different user to login with?

What to do?

Hi Darin,

Judging by your message, I think that it would probably be in the best
interests of all concerned (your client, you and the data) for you to
hire someone who understands MV systems.

This person will very quickly intuit how the system is structured and
what the original implementor had in mind. It is my guess that you will
spend huge amounts of time attempting to do the same ... and most
likely will miss some important bits.

There are some very knowledgable people on the East Coast of the US.

Just a suggestion,
-Tom

The command to start an interactive session is "d3" not "d3tcl". Try
"d3" and you will get another login prompt. Try something from the list
of logons you have to actually get into the system.

I would agree with Tom in recommending hiring an experienced Pick
person to handle this.

Good Luck.

Matt

Darin, I agree with our colleagues - A couple hours of consulting time
will get things fixed quickly. Yes, that release of D3 is old but D3
is a current DBMS and used widely. Getting data out of D3 is very
straight-forward but figuring out how to do it on your own with no
mentoring or time invested will be a pain.

Based on your website bio I see you're trying to approach this like a
SQL database. D3 is mostly used as an environment that you get into,
and do all operations from within. Import/Export of data is quite
easy from within the VM but you need to know what fields to use, which
isn't a question you've asked yet but I'm sure it will be in a few
days if you continue down this path. In a few more days you might
realize that you can't do SQL queries without mapping the existing
definitions to a SQL-compliant schema - remember, this is not
relational so it must be told how to "look" relational. The best way
is to not use SQL at all - we don't need to access MV data using
"queries" like we do with relational databases.

I see you have C# experience. A .NET class library called mv.NET is
available which will allow you to connect into that D3 system and do
queries on the data using graphical tools (or even direct from
VS2003/5). You can export the data into datasets, and serialize or
pass the data to a relational environment as you wish. E-mail me for
more info.

I can offer remote assistance to get into the box, work with you to
see what's in there, and export what you need, but timing could be an
issue these days as I'm working on a number of projects and going to
Chicago for a couple weeks starting next week.

The D3 system is quite capable. Please don't assume data needs to be
migrated - it's possible to integrate the system and applications into
the end-user environment. I can help you (and your client?) to decide
how to best interoperate with that box, and even work with you to
extract out all required data if required.

HTH
Tony Gravagno
Nebula Research and Development
Former D3 Product Manager, QA Manager, and other useless titles


darin.strait wrote:

Oops, if mailing, please unmunge and use this address:
TG@ remove-this-anti-spam-partNebula-RnD.com

Tony

Hi Darin,

My guess is that you work/ed with sql and you want something like
select * from file. D3 is not that straight forward and you will need
to write a program to do it or get some third party software.

I've written an application which could help you with that.
have a look at www.ramto.com......it is free btw. You would need d3odbc
running on the server.

Peter