[geeks] EDI, COBOL and fixed fields...

[Jonathan Katz]

On Feb 1, 2008, at 10:48 PM, Shannon Hendrix wrote:
> You may be right.
>
> Think of the difference between reading an XML record and reading a
> traditional fixed-field EDI file.


Wow...

At my last real job we had a project migrating data from mainframes  
to an Oracle database.

We were trying to figure out how to get these VSAM files imported the  
right way. One of the great things is that these VSAM files had fixed  
length fields BUT the quantity of those fields would vary by record.  
Each record was on its own line. One of the fields towards the  
beginning of the line would give the quantity that the other fields  
would repeat by. COBOL had a hook for this with some REPEATS  
directive, but trying to figure it out elsewise was breaking our  
brains. Oracle couldn't handle it on its own, of course, I was  
dinking with a perl script, and someone else eventually set up their  
own java app for wrangling the files into a format that Oracle would  
be happy with.

-Jon