Re: DRDA Connection Support (was news400 goes negative on IBM?) -- MIDRANGE-L

There is something in, say, SQL Server that responds to requests from ODBC. This is probably some kind of host server thingy, just like the database host server stuff on the 400. I don't think any database has to have something that understands DRDA, the ARD on the 400 needs to understand how to talk with sockets to whatever is listening in SQL Server or MySQL or whatever. Just as an ODBC driver translates the statements in your VB or C++ app to the syntax required for the remote database, so would a DRDA ARD. Then a socket connection is used in both cases to talk probably to the same component of the remote database.

At least that's what I think is going on - it certainly is in the case of ODBC. And the remote database is not running anything related to ODBC, it is running its own thing. But I can certainly be far off in this matter.

Now I have not dug too deeply into this. The only info in InfoCenter is in the APIs, in a section called SQL Client Integration Exit Program. You can find it if you go to APIs by category, to the Database & Files section.

There is mention there of the Distributed Relational Database Architecture Reference, SC26-4651. If you have $43.25 US you can get it from

http://www.elink.ibmlink.ibm.com/public/applications/publications/cgibin/pbi.cgi?PAG=C11&SSN=05EYC0011781973701&TRL=&WRD=&PBL=SC26-4651&LST=ALL&RPP=10&BTN%3DSRH.x=7&BTN%3DSRH.y=9

And I did find the standard as of 2004 at the opengroup link named in another post. It does seem that DRDA is a 2-way protocol, so I might need to revise my comments a little.

Anyway, the standard is open and published, as already stated. And download from opengroup.org is free.

At 10:40 AM 5/23/2005, you wrote:

Rob,
The "we" part could be to create an Open Source project to accomplish something similar. A DRDA-Bridge project might be possible. The biggest issue is (besides the fact that I don't see a lot of enthusiasm for RPG open source projects) is that the DRDA implementations are vendor specific. We'd need to know quite a bit about each particular DB in order to write a server for each target DB.

You could possibly write a DRDA-ODBC bridge that would talk to ODBC/Ole DB providers and return DRDA compliant data but that would be two middle ware traversals that would hamper performance (my guess).

I know nothing about the DRDA spec and *some* about ODBC/JDBC specs. It would be a useful project but I would guess given our own personal project lists, an open source implementation wouldn't happen.
Pete Helgren
rob@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
I agree Joe.  What can we do about it?
Does MS have the equivalent of IBM's Design Change Request?
Rob Berendt
--
This is the Midrange Systems Technical Discussion (MIDRANGE-L) mailing list
To post a message email: MIDRANGE-L@xxxxxxxxxxxx
To subscribe, unsubscribe, or change list options,
visit: http://lists.midrange.com/mailman/listinfo/midrange-l
or email: MIDRANGE-L-request@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Before posting, please take a moment to review the archives
at http://archive.midrange.com/midrange-l.