Middleware from legacy software specialist Transoft could help
businesses modernise their
Cobol
applications without the need to change any code.
The software, called CIO, has been used by US health insurer
Reserve National, to migrate a mainframe database containing six
million records onto a Microsoft SQL Server relational database
without having to modify any of its Cobol applications.
With over 3000 Cobol applications, Reserve National has more
than 3,000 Cobol applications, and did not want to make any
modifications to the legacy code.
The company worked with
Transoftto develop CIO, a
database middleware product that uses SQL Server to store and
retrieve mainframe data. The product translates data between the
relational format used by SQL Server and the hierarchical database
format required by the insurance firm's 3,000 Cobol
applications.
Raymund Gordon, vice-president, information technology at
Reserve National, said, "All 3,000 Cobol applications can now
access the SQL Server database, without any modification in the
code." Reserve National took one afternoon to migrate a six million
record database from the legacy hierachical data format to MS SQL
Server. "Once loaded into SQL Server all I needed to do was change
the environment variable to tell the Cobol application to use SQL
Server as its data source."
The CIO software and SQL Server run on two Dell PowerEdge 2600
quad-core servers, one for production, the second for testing. The
CPU load of SQL Server on the Dell never exceeds 20%, according to
Gordon. He said this means that the server is not overworked and
has plenty of spare capacity.
Gordon kept some databases in the legacy hierachical format. He
only moved the databases that required dynamic data access onto SQL
Server, as it generally offers far better performance for this type
of database access.
Gordon said the overall performance of the IT system at Reserve
Mutual had improved by moving these databases onto SQL Server,
since the hierachical databases no longer needed to support dynamic
access.
Hierarchical databases used by Cobol applications are unsuitable
for certain types of database query. Businesses that need to run
such applications often embark on complex migration projects to
move the Cobol code on to a relational database server such as
Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle or DB/2.