Re: Reading C-ISAM Data with Borland Delphi

Marian Maier wrote: > I have been given the assignment of enabling an application written in > Borland Delphi to access Data stored by an application written in > MicroFocus COBOL and something called "C-ISAM Filehandler". I suggest Relational DataBridge for Micro Focus. Read further suggestions below. > > The COBOL-Application is running on Windows95 and writing its data to > the local disk. > > The "accessing" part of my Delphi-Application will be simple: It has > to iterate over ALL records in a BIG table distributing them to > different tables in other formats. No index lookups, no writing to the > C-ISAM-Files. Exclusive access to the files will be given to my > application during this process. > > Knowing nothing about COBOL and C-ISAM i did a search on the net and > found a lot of products and information. Nothing of it relates > directly to my problem. If you found www.liant.com then you found something that indeed relates directly to your problem. It relates so directly that it means that you probably would not have to write an application at all. Instead, you define the relational tables using the existing COBOL data without need for distribution to any other tables. Delphi (or VB or any other ODBC-enabled product) will have instant, direct access to the data in the "COBOL" files, using standard ODBC SQL. > > There are several ODBC-Drivers claiming to read C-ISAM-Files but they > either seem to require NT or target client-server-environments with > the data on some UNIX- or NT-Box on a Network. Relational Databridge is available in a "single tier" version for Micro Focus, and has been for several years. > > Then there are C-Libraries from Informix and Byte Designs. These could > of course be called from Delphi but i fear the interfacing. > > Both solutions are expensive. This in itself is not the problem, but i > dare not come up with anything we would have to pay > per-installation-royalties for, as the people paying me are allergic > to that :-). This is difficult for me to understand. Presumably, the "people paying you" have paid for, or will pay for, the computers which run this application, have paid for the application (either through licensing or development costs), have paid for a Windows license for each of the machines, and so forth. The "royalty" for your proposed solution is the higher cost of development and maintenance of your Delphi application, which would not even exist when using Relational DataBridge. (And your personal reward is to be allowed to work on something more interesting!?) It might be that royalties, when properly understood, offer a significant value to the end users who, after all, just want to get to the data that you can unleash by the use of the appropriate product, without the need for some "in-between" step to distribute the data to tables. Allergic reactions can respond to appropriate desensitizing medication, and most allergy sufferers willingly pay for the medicine, if it works as advertised. > > My needs are so simple that i am now thinking of reading the *.dat > files directly - is there any documentation available on their format? Micro Focus has this information in its manuals. Best regards, -- Tom Morrison, T.Morrison@liant.com Liant Software Corporation http://www.liant.com/ 512-343-1010 FAX:512-343-9487