Oracle - Adabas bridge

We have been using Adabas from Software AG for more than fifteen years. Once ahead of its time, Adabas is now, from our point of view less adapted to what we want to do. We recently entered into the world of Oracle. While Adabas runs on an IBM mainframe, Oracle runs under Unix. All our legacy systems have been developped with Adabas and Natural.

As long as we develop small isolated systems under Oracle, we have no problem.  When we want to develop a large system however, we get into trouble: we need to access data contained in the Adabas database and at the same time, the old programs running on the mainframe need to access the Oracle data newly transferred.

As we are lazy people, we don't want to modify our old applications refering to files belonging to another system when this later one is transferred to Oracle, we need some kind of a transparent bridge.

What seems the least bothering would be to duplicate tables referenced by both systems and to develop a tool to keep then synchronized. It is duplication but it should be a lot more efficient if an Oracle application only talk to Oracle databases than if the SQL requests has to be translated in the strange Adabas calls. The reverse is also true; Adabas calls are atomic... to translate then into efficient SQL requests would be a mess.

We looked at a few commercial products (Open Gateway/Oracle, EDA-SQL/Information Builders, Entire SQL Server/Software AG, Top End/NCR) none seem to either be ready or do what we really want.

Did someone ever tried to solve that kind of problem, what have been the solutions, are there products available somewhere?

Michel Keable : mkeable_at_cti.ulaval.ca Received on Fri Oct 15 1993 - 22:11:26 CET