Re: Informix Question

On Mon, 8 Feb 1999, Ahmed El-Sonbaty wrote: > I have ICL machine VME with IDMSX (Network Database) so i need to > upgrade this database to Informix, so > - what would i do, > - how to convert the database, > - is there any way to use the current application (COBOL) that is > dealing with the current database and use it for the new Informix > database. > This is urgent to me, I need to take a decision. Interesting. I don't think there's an Informix port for VME - nor even for the VNX subsystem, if that still exists - so you're obviously going to be changing hardware. I once did a C-ISAM port for VNX (that was an interesting experience), but the version was something like 3.00.05A, and is about 10 years old and totally unsupported. Your new machine will probably be some sort of Unix box; it will use ASCII or one of its heirs and successors (ISO 8859-1 or the like) for the native character set. Your database is non-relational; therefore, you will have to redesign the database and applications to use relational database methods -- which means recode the application using SQL. That ain't going to be easy. How you convert the database will depend on how relational-like the current IDMSX database design is. The normal technique is to insist that the data is exported from the old database in an ASCII format with one record per (logical) output line, with the fields separated by a delimiter. Since ICL VME uses a variant on EBCDIC, you may end up having to export in EBCDIC and then use a translator to convert from EBCDIC to ASCII on the target machine. The existing COBOL applications will be very difficult to use. They will be coded to use the IDMSX statements and data structures; there are no simple equivalents in the relational world. Most of the above comments apply equally to any of the relational databases. In particular, the COBOL won't be directly reusable. Yours, Jonathan Leffler (jleffler@informix.com) #include <wish/I/was/skiing.h> Guardian of DBD::Informix v0.60 (v0.61_02) -- http://www.perl.com/CPAN Informix IDN for D4GL & Linux -- http://www.informix.com/idn