Write the code in Java and use a JDBC Type 4 driver. Should be quite doable for most popular relational databases.
If you have to get around an EBCDIC to ASCII issue you might need to run the JVM with the file encoding flag to say to do the I/O in an ASCII codepage encoding by default so the JDBC driver is happy, and then specifically use an EBCDIC codepage while doing I/O on the mainframe side. If you need to come from another language it's probably going to get trickier. And there are options for calling between (for example) Java and COBOL, but again, trickier than just doing everything in Java. However, it might not be too bad if you can create one generic module (or even copybook) for doing I/O to the database and let it handle getting to/from the database, whether that be directly or indirectly through Java somehow. Note: you don't want to spin up a new JVM for every database call! So you may consider something running the database calls through some sort of started task that is sitting there waiting for requests. That could be CICS, WebSphere, Tomcat, or even something you write yourself, although I suspect getting over to Websphere via WOLA or CICS will be most performant. Scott Chapman ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
