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

[Lionel Peterson]

>From: Jonathan Katz <jon at jonworld.com>
>Date: 2008/02/01 Fri PM 10:02:16 CST
>To: The Geeks List <geeks at sunhelp.org>
>Subject: [geeks] EDI, COBOL and fixed fields...

>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.

Sounds like you could have used a bit of COBOL in your solution - I'm 
*positive* you can access Oracle databases from inside COBOL. I've doen a 
little bit of work with VSAM files - that's a fun technology...

Lionel