On Sep 21, 2013, at 1:43 PM, Kingsley Idehen wrote:
I thought I was explicit in stating that a major challenge of legacy systems is NOT the data, but the systems themselves... COBOL, JCL, CICS, DB2, IMS, DELTA, EasyTrieve, etc.
There are tools in the form of data access drivers that provide access to data associated with all the above. These drivers enable access via SQL i.e., the middleware maps the underlying data to the RDBMS model.
Please read what I'm trying to say.
So far I say "system" & you say "data"... I'm NOT talking about the data a system processes.
One of the layers of complexity that must be addressed in legacy portfolios is NOT the data stored in flat files or any sort of DBMS, it is the systems themselves. The software that contains the business logic that processes the data.
There is a tremendous amount of "business logic" buried in the software, as opposed to the data the software processes. There is also a tremendous amount of obsolete junk buried in the systems. Figuring out which is which non trivial.
Is there something that you do not grok about the different between "system" & "data?" They are two different things. The machine tools (the systems) processes the raw materials (data) into finished goods (data).
This entire exercise is absolutely NOT nicely confined to RDBMS engines. I think I've already said that I met one fellow who matter-of-factly commented that his organization has some 28 DBMS engines in use. I could only count to 17.