VSAM conversion for COBOL programs

Abstract

VSAM database systems are widely used on IBM mainframe systems. COBOL is the most frequently used host language to access VSAM databases. To fix the Year 2000 bug and migrate to new client/server technology, business organizations are re-engineering their legacy COBOL programs and converting VSAM databases to SQL databases. This paper addresses two important problems in VSAM conversion: database schema conversion and SQL query generation. It proposes a semi-automatic approach to the conversion of VSAM data sets to SQL tables and the conversion of VSAM operations to embedded SQL statements. The proposed approach and a prototype tool have been tested on COBOL programs from industry. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.