>Thanks for all the ideas and the offer. I'm not in a position to take >you up on the offer due to the fact that it would likely land me in hot >water (poached sysprog, anybody?).
Hot water? It would? That's...odd. :-) I suppose asking the boss is out of the question? Or inviting him/her? >I wish DB2 were an option. However, between doctor visits, I'm >installing Oracle on z/OS right now. No choice. It was literally "no >charge" due to our Oracle license. I don't know what that license costs >us, but it truly is "unlimited" WRT where we can install an Oracle >server. Oracle is an option, certain, as mentioned. It has some cons, I think (as noted previously), but technically I think it might work. Please let us all know how Oracle z/OS goes. I'm working with another customer that's looking at it and am very curious. They'd be using it with CICS and C/C++. >I do plan to use Oracle's AM4CICS. But directing data directly to a >remote Oracle database will require programming. And the usual question >of what to do if the remote server is down. As I understand AM4CICS it follows the EXEC SQL programming syntax, so if you stick to that you're portable to DB2. But if you're not already using EXEC SQL in CICS then that's an issue, and it sounds like that's the case. And some of the development compile-time steps change a little, specifically there's a precompiler that you need to invoke. And XPLink isn't necessarily supported, depending on what you're doing. Not a big fan of "free" software that triggers lots of programming work, since that's not at all free. But these things are situational, so it's possible it could work. Warning signs would be stuff like "Gosh, that's wonderful, now can you add these six VSAM files for these 100 programs, too?" Microsoft's estimate of writing and testing one line of code is $50, to throw out a number. And programming tends to take time, and users are impatient, sometimes with good business reason. But I'm certainly not opposed to programming per se. - - - - - Timothy Sipples IBM Consulting Enterprise Software Architect Specializing in Software Architectures Related to System z Based in Tokyo, Serving IBM Japan and IBM Asia-Pacific E-Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: GET IBM-MAIN INFO Search the archives at http://bama.ua.edu/archives/ibm-main.html
