Does anybody think there might be some interest in an ISAM driver for PostgreSQL? I've written a functional alpha that allows PostgreSQL to be a drop in (or as easy as reasonably possible) replacement for an ISAM file system driving a COBOL application. It is a STL based thin wrapper around libpq that generates queries on the fly from traditional ISAM (read, write, start, etc.). It was made to be generic, allowing porting to various COBOL vendors' compilers with minimal effort. Error conditions are returned as traditional COBOL error codes. The main drawback to the system is that performance is highly sensitive to network latency (as are most COBOL applications).
Unlike traditional hybrid COBOL which use ESQL, this system could run native COBOL code with reasonable performance in any COBOL application which allows linking to an external ISAM file system. This is very much a work in progress, built strictly for my own needs; but could be made to be useful in a more general sense. I'm thinking about cleaning up the code and setting up a project on sourceforge. PostgreSQL is uniquely suited for this purpose because of its portability and rich syntax. A good example is postgres's array type which maps very elegantly to COBOL's OCCURS syntax. Regards, Merlin ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 1: subscribe and unsubscribe commands go to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
