EPI Now Distributing CenturioDB Tool

Published: September 11, 2007

by Alex Woodie

Excel Program Inventions, an IBM business partner based in Southern California, is taking over North American sales of CenturioDB, a tool that provides i5/OS applications with very quick access to data residing off the platform. EPI also announced a new release of CenturioDB, which was developed and released in 2006 by a German company of the same name

A year ago, the German programmer Markus Litters launched the first release of CenturioDB. The software was designed to allow System i users and applications to access external databases interactively, directly from the 5250 green screen, via SQL commands, without the need for System i programmers to use specific SQL clients or query tools.

Flexibility and speed are CenturioDB's main attributes. Litters claims the software, which he developed with Microsofts' ADO.NET technology, runs 1,500 percent faster than traditional ODBC access. The software runs on a separate Windows gateway PC or server, although a Java gateway is available that can run directly on the System i server.

This month, Litters and Excel Program Inventions (EPI) came to terms on a deal that gives EPI rights to distribute CenturioDB in the North American market. "We think it is a great product with lots and lots of potential," says John Caine of EPI.

A new release of CenturioDB is also on tap. With version 1.5, support has been added for DB2 UDB version 9, the so-called "Viper" release of the multi-platform database management system. Other new features include a new mode for reading large volumes of data, which EPI says boosts data transfer rates by up to a factor of 30, and an ODBC driver for connecting to databases that don't yet have a new ADO.NET driver.

CenturioDB is also working on a new add-on module called CRTNETRPGI that's designed to allow System i shops to extend their RPG programs to .NET without having to make any major changes to their programs, just a recompile. The add-on, which should be available next month, will be free to all current CenturioDB users, Caine says.

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