Tonight I am going to write a short review on a nice little product that we use company wide on a daily basis. The product I am speaking of is called CONNX. So you are now wondering what is CONNX? CONNX provides connection to data sources and legacy applications through open standards across all major platforms. We use CONNX extensively to get data in and out of an RMS database on a VMS server into SQL Server 2005. I will not go into detail on this process to much during this post, I am saving this for later. CONNX can take data out of relational and non relations database systems, transaction systems and legacy applications. Some examples of the compatible systems are ADABAS, DB2, IMS, VSAM-MVS, Informix, Oracle, SYBASE, RMS, PostgreSQL, and SQL Server.

 Installation of CONNX is fairly straighforward and the wizard walks you through most everything. Starting with CONNX 1o, you will need to also have a server or box on the network that can act as the CONNX license server. CONNX also installs a nice little configuration management tool in Windows and comes with a powerful query application called InfoNaut.

I have only had a few issues with putting data back into RMS through CONNX, most of this has been configuration issues on my SQL Server box that seem to be resolved now. There are multiple licensing schemes available through CONNX to fit almost any need. So if you get into a project where you need data in and out of systems that you are not familiar with, look at CONNX and maybe you’ll be surprised.