AirGate connects reservation systems to the Internet

AirGate is a gateway server between the SABRE travel reservation network and the HexBase Web database.

SABRE Data Center Facts: Equipment: 17 mainframes with more than 15.3 terabytes of storage Processing Power: more than 4,000 MIPS System reliability: 99.998% (including scheduled down-time) Airfares: builds one billion fares, updated 5 times per day Speed: over 5000 transactions per second Average transaction time: less than 2 seconds Annual bookings: more than 300 million Unique Security System: able to withstand 300 mile per hour winds, tornadoes and zone 4 earthquakes.

The SABRE Group operates one of the largest privately-owned computer systems. The heart of this system is a 120,000 square foot, high-security data center located in Tulsa, Oklahoma. This data center runs SABRE in a mainframe operating environment, the ideal solution for the high volume, high availability requirements of the distribution business.

Technical information about AirGate:

AirGate for SABRE is the first travel information gateway from the newly grounded HexMac Connectivity Division. Gateways to other computer reservation systems are under development at this very moment.

AirGate is implemented as a dedicated UNIX server. It controls usage of the given hardware (IBM ARTIC X.25 coprocessor boards) and maintains communication to the web server interface.

HexBase Web Database contains an API with functions corresponding to such of the SABRE host language. These functions are implemented as database queries. For each query HexBase will open a TCP/IP connection to the AirGate.

AirGate does not need to run on the same host as the web server. Access is limited by a list of permitted hosts. The AirGate daemon will check for the hostname and if the capacity is not exceeded. If this is successful, a child instance is forked to handle the request. In the next version of AirGate, which will be released soon, a CORBA interface is designed to access Airgate from any industrial-strength database system.

Test AirGate in action: FOCUS Online has launched one of the largest travel databases on the Net. At FOCUS Reise-Center you can search through over 500.000 flights from 170 airlines and over 200.000 last-second travels. HexBase AirGate provides the live connection to SABRE computer reservation system.

This process initializes the API and do a signing into the SABRE system if required. Then the query input is analyzed. The AirGate Interchange Definition (AGID) allows one or more SABRE commands to be given, with output concatenated or overwritten by following pages.

All transactions will be logged and dumped to a file containing administrative information (an unique transaction id, format information, a part of the query input) and the screen contents.

Debugging features include the possibility to mail the output to a given address for a single query and to mail an error message with dumped answers and logfile extracts in case of errors.

If the query is successful completed, the requested output pages from SABRE will be sent back to the HexBase instance which is responsible for parsing the answer contents. The wanted information is available as database fields after this is completed.

AirGate functions include:

- Schedule Display: Get flights between given airports for a longer period.
- City Pair Availability: Get flights and available seats between given airports for a given date.
- Verify Flight: Get more information about a given flight.
- TOURLINK Booking: This is an Interface to SABRE TOURLINK which gives access to many european tour operators. Availability of given flights and hotels is checked and the price returned. Direct booking of itineraries is possible.

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