garyrevell wrote: ↑Fri Jul 23, 2021 9:00 am
Whatever happened to Datatrieve? We've got a lot of RMS files (SEQ, Indexed etc)
1) Do you have record layouts - which format(s)?
2) Just curious, or a serious business need?
3) Read on OpenVMS only (in which case indexed or not does not matter) or read on other platform after transferring?
Datatrieve was, and still is, a wonderful tool.
To make it work you'll need a CDD record definition or Cobol Copy book (if memory serves me).
What kind of dictionary do you have a available describing the data?
Some language include files like Cobol copy books? C - H files? Pascal? Basic? Fortran?
Maybe you can turn your record description module into XML or JSON and for tools on Windows or Linux after transferring data as sequential files?
( CONVERT/FDL=NL: indexed.dat sequential.dat /STAT )
DIX was mentioned and deserves a closer look. Check here:
https://oooovms.dyndns.org/dix/
From the notes there:
"Interpreted. You need a record description to do this.
The description file syntax looks like fortran record definitions(structures)
and the descriptions can be in a file or in the DIX_DES.TLB text library.
The layout of the description files is described in the DIX
help library under the topic RECORD_FORMAT_FOR_DESCRIPTIONS"
Can you convert your layouts to Fortran style to feed DIX?
Personally I like the no-longer-selling old Attunity Connect which can take just about any record descriptor (cobol, basic, pascal, CDDL) and change it to XML after which it offers SQL access directly on OpenVMS or remotely with ODBC
Along the same lines you could check out the old Connect competitor ConnX (now owned by Software Ag).
https://www.connx.com/products/pdf/RMS.pdf
And how about this one? dynamic JSON OpenVMS RMS API -
https://sgco.com/landing/dynamic-api/