ACU4GL

ACU4GL

Today’s business climate, more than ever, drives a focus on costs within the IT organization. Where multiple technologies are being used to address a common business need there will be unnecessary costs introduced to manage those systems, build connections between them, and deal with multiple vendors. One area where this has particularly noticeable has been in the area of data storage. IT organizations often wish to standardize on a single database technology to leverage economies of scale while reducing the variety of admin and integration expertise needed to interact with multiple systems.While this proposition is attractive, if the IT or-ganization has a substantial set of application investments that are tied to an existing data format, the cost to move may outweigh the po-tential benefits. With Micro Focus® Acu4GL®, the need for a proprietary data format for COBOL data can be lifted while not requiring a rewrite of COBOL applications. The organi-zation sees the benefits of reduced manage-ment overhead and increased data flexibility with very little risk since they continue to run COBOL applications without change.Product HighlightsMicro Focus Acu4GL provides a patented bind ing between standard COBOL VSAM type syntax (OPEN, CLOSE, READ, WRITE) and relational database management sys-tems (RDBMS) without having to change the COBOL applications. By moving the COBOL data into a RDBMS, the IT organization can use existing skills to manage the data and exploit the database providers tools for management functions such as backup or scaling.Key BenefitsSupport for Oracle, IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL Server, Sybase, Informix, and ODBC makes it easy for existing administrators (DBAs) and for database skills and assets to be leveraged. Access data in a RDBMS without changing COBOL code or learning SQL provides real time analytics capabilities to existing COBOL assets. Automated data type mapping from relational database types to/from COBOL makes it easy for any DBA to understand the COBOL data without changing existing data subsets.Key FeaturesAutomatic Data MappingAcu4GL uses data dictionaries to map COBOL data items to database fields. These dictionaries are also called eXtended File Descriptors (XFDs) because they’re based on standard COBOL file descriptors (FDs). To generateXFDs, the “-Fx”