RE: COBOL File Specs to DDS or SQL

Unfortunately there are many COBOL field definition techniques that simply cannot be replicated with DDS (or SQL).

Most of them are poor or older techniques, but old COBOL programs seem to make abundant use of them.

For example:

- repeating fields and arrays (monthly-sales occurs 12 times)

- redefines
Phone# can be defined as positions 1 thru 10, with AreaCode mapped to positions 1 thru 3.

- multi-format records can exist in cobol (columns don't line up and one record may contain completely different info than another)
Even though DDS can handle multi-format files thru an LF, it is ugly and not a straightforward one to one conversion.


To get a handle on these, I would suggest building a file of the fields used in the cobol procedure division, and only be concerned with building DDS or SQL for the fields that are used in the pgms.
Hopefully that will eliminate a large portion of the field names (which could be ignored).




-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of DrFranken
Sent: Thursday, August 16, 2012 8:31 AM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: COBOL File Specs to DDS or SQL

Suppose I had some COBOL specifications that defined a file layout.
Could I take those and programatically turn it into either DDS or an SQL
statement to create the file? The Specs are available in a file.

Thing is the record is 12,000 bytes wide and the COBOL specs are 4,500
lines long! Many are redefines and sub-fields which are not needed.
Doing this by hand seems daunting and fraught with peril. Incoming file
needs to be read, processed and then returned to customer with
delimiters between fields.

Help?

- Larry "DrFranken" Bolhuis