Oracle Corp, which at one time talked of putting pretty much all of its software – even including much of the database – up on IBM Corp’s AS/400, had to scale back its ambitions pretty drastically, but at the end of last week, it did announce the Oracle Transparent Gateway for SQL/400, saying it enables Oracle7 users on any system to integrate AS/400s into an Oracle distributed database environment. The Transparent Gateway for SQL/400 provides both read and write access to any data on the AS/400, and uses Oracle7 technology so that an AS/400 database can participate in an Oracle7 managed two-phase commit transaction. The system uses Oracle’s SQL-Net products and supports APPC/LU6.2 and TCP/IP. SQL-Net provides a consistent application programming interface on all clients regardless of network protocol or operating system. The Transparent Gateway for SQL/400 is available now and starts at $7,500.
