Adabas to IDMS conversion
Gilbert Saint-flour
We're a consulting company in the US trying to help one of our customers
convert a set of applications from Adabas to IDMS. Our own experience
with these DBMSes is limited but, from what the customers says, the
application only access Adabas via about 300 Natural sub-routines and one
solution would be to rewrite these routines to change data base accesses
from Adabas to IDMS - we're not sure how true this is though.
Is there any consultant with strong IDMS skills on this list willing to
help us propose a solution to our customer? Please e-mail or call me
directly - thanks in advance.
Gilbert Saint-flour
Livingston, NJ 07039
(973) 992-9318
PS: in case you're wondering, the customer is moving the application from
an environment where they have Adabas to another environment which already
has IDMS; they want to avoid the Adabas license fees in the target
environment.
MaceMace
I have never heard of anyone trying to access
IDMS using NATURAL. I don't think that it is
possible, because the databases are of two
distinctly different types. ADABAS is an
inverted list/pseudo-relational database, and
IDMS is a network type database. Of course,
since Natural is in many ways similar to SQL,
maybe there is someone that has implemented
it in that manner. I will do some checking.
Hlowever, I have used both databases and think that the customer will enjoy
the increased flexibility
that IDMS will give them. In fact, IDMS is even
more powerful than DB2 according to programmers
who have used both.
What your customer will probably need to do,
is convert the applications to ADSO and
SQL for online access, and COBOL with DML
commands for batch access.
I know of several companies that specialize
in this type of project, and could put you in contact
if you like. Maybe you could work out a partner-
ship agreement for this project. Contact me if you
would like to pursue it.
Good Luck!
Best Regards,
Steve Mason
GEEZLE, INC.
NormaB
Don't forget that IDMS can also be implemented as a Relational Database, with SQL
as the method of access, if the SQL option has been purchased. Also, with the SQL
option installed, you can even access the network databases with SQL. It is a
quite powerful product.
Barry R Fine
The Tesseract package (HRMS/BENEFITS/Payroll) supported both Adabas and IDMS.
They did it using a black box module (linked into the I/O) to read/write.
The Tesseract package was written to read/write VSAM.
The blackbox was changed to support ADABAS/IDMS/IMS/DB2/VSAM.
The first thing to consider is the mapping from one schema to another.
I think ADABAS is Relational and IDMS is Network.
The next question is to find out if Natural will support IDMS.
If it does, then the subroutine change would be the best long term.
I would look at the ADABAS module in Natural to see how it works.
I would try convert one module to IDMS to get a handle on how hard it would be.