Re: What database am I running on AIX 4.2?

Ben Burnett wrote:

        [ Big snip ]
>
> I did however extract some strings from some of the unstripped
> executables that make up the application and it appears that the whole
> thing is written in COBOL (a language which I know nearly nothing
> about). Every time you need to instantiate a process in the app you
> have to run "cbrun xxx.gnt" where xxx.gnt is the name of a "module" of
> the app. I'm guessing that the .gnt files are compiled COBOL programs
> and that 'cbrun' is the COBOL run time? (anybody please let me know
> if I'm way off here)
>
> I did some research on COBOL and it looks like all of the files in the
> DATA directory (paired files xxyyzz and xxyyzz.idx) are COBOL ISAM
> files that I read about. Does this sound right? This makes me think
> that there may not be an actual dbm package that the application is
> using to manage data but that the "dbm layer" of the application is
> actually coded into the application itself.
>
> Since I don't have access to any source code to figure out what the
> layout of the data is within these data files it looks like I'm not
> going to be able to do the data conversion by accessing the data
> directly. Unless anyone out there knows of a way to figure out how
> the application "information" is stored in these data files (?) I'm
> going to see if I can 'scrape' the printable reports that the system
> generates and convert the data that way.
>
> TIA
>
> - Ben

Ah, COBOL (the language that won't die). It sounds like your files
are IBM VSAM with an index file for each data file. See if you can
find any utilities that will dump a VSAM file to straight sequential
or output a listing of the contents of a VSAM file. In either case
you should be able to redirect the output to a file, operate on the
contents of the file using your favorite programming language|shell
scripting|programmer's editor and then load it into your new database. Received on Fri Mar 15 2002 - 04:29:19 CET