Mainframe VSAM to Relational DB (Done In 60 Seconds)
March 1st, 2018
In my previous article, we showed you how Heirloom can automatically transform a complex mainframe warehousing application and deploy it to a Java Application Server in 60 seconds with 100% accuracy, guaranteed.
Since we’ve already showcased what we can do with application code & logic, we’re now going to take a look at what Heirloom does for data transformation. Again, it will only take 60 seconds so keep that in mind when you’ve watched the video and taken a breath to consider the benefits of transforming proprietary mainframe data stores into accessible relational databases.
So, what happened? We took a VSAM KSDS file encoded as EBCDIC from the mainframe, analyzed the record structure, and used that XML representation to extract, transform and load the data into a PostgreSQL database table encoded in ASCII. The application was then executed without any changes to the source code (so yes, we were using the applications existing COBOL I/O statements to seamlessly access the relational data).
The application knows nothing of this wonderous outcome and “believes” it is still grinding through a VSAM file that is still blessed with packed decimals & redefined record structures. Heaven. Shhh, we won’t tell if you don’t.
Further, because the data is now in a relational store, we can easily establish views to make the data visible to other applications that need to interrogate the data via SQL.
When migrating mainframe workloads, data is often overlooked along with other areas such as batch processing, security, deployment, cloud, DevOps, UI modernization, and application refactoring. Heirloom is the only platform in the market that fully addresses each of these critical components. Something that we will continue to make clear over the coming weeks. And don’t forget, with Heirloom, migrated workloads are 100% Java deployed to any industry-standard Java Application Server (e.g. Apache Tomcat).