Reading C-ISAM Data with Borland Delphi

Hi, 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". 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. 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. 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 :-). My needs are so simple that i am now thinking of reading the *.dat files directly - is there any documentation available on their format? Any help, directions, pointers to products or further reading would be very much appreciated. Bye, MM -- Fon: +49 228 624013 Fax: +49 228 624031 "Was schiefgehen kann, geht auch schief."