I'll admit I was wrong about Cobol being a database. I guess it is in the sense that an encrypted text file or a spreadsheet could be considered the same. But you should at least admit that you are dealing with an old piece of crap. And I mean that in the nicest possible way. ;-)
-----Original Message----- From: On Behalf Of RtX Sent: Thursday, November 16, 2006 1:19 PM
On 11/16/06, Jeremy Fowler [email protected] wrote:
Cobol is a programming language but it stores its data in
binary flat
files. So in a sense it is its own database. There are applications that can extract data out of cobol files, but it's a messy
task. There
is no such beast as an ODBC Cobol driver...
I knew Cobol was/is a programming language. Someone pointed the obvious out for me. Thanks. True, there is no ODBC Cobol driver. Could make things interesting in data conversion. We'll see.
We had a Cobol based Agency Management system here four
years ago. We
ended up moving to a SQL based solution from another vendor. We did have to extract some data from the Cobol app, but luckily the new vendor had experience with our old system and was able to do
that for
us. The data wasn't very pretty.
Did your vendor have to write a data conversion app? I would assume so.
I would recommend your client shop around for a more technologically advanced trucking system. Or have one designed.
My client is happy with the current software so shopping is probably not an option.