Mission Critical Data

If your data must be available at any time - 24 hours per day, 7 days per week - then it is termed mission-critical. Any hardware and software used for such data must preserve its integrity and availability. Much of this data is already stored on mainframe systems, and they are ideal for such storage. The hardware and software are stable and highly reliable. They are designed to provide speed of access to data with high-levels of concurrent access in online transaction processing (OLTP) systems.

AIM transaction processing systems allow access to mission-critical data, but these existing OLTP systems use terminal-based interfaces. Most users would prefer to have GUI-based screen images and their associated benefits. Such are provided by PowerAIM. This has components running on the PC work-station and the mainframe system, interfacing to the database system.

Conventional transaction processing systems use fixed sets of programs on the mainframe system accessing the mission-critical data. Since the end-user has a "dumb" terminal all of the intelligence must be written into the mainframe application. When GUI-based screen images are used, some of the application intelligence may be distributed to the PC work-station. PowerCOBOL may be used to develop the application on the work-station to interface to the user and to PowerAIM on the PC.