Dictionary Dictionary

[Mike Palandri]

At 01:12 PM 06/10/1998 -0400, EDISR@detroitedison.com wrote:
>G'day all 
> 
>Mike, I'm sure if I understand your question clearly.  In the OpenVMS world
>we 
>have a tool called QSHOW from COGNOS that not only reports the PHD contents 
>but can output a PDL file or CDD format. 
> 
>Are you trying to examine a database schema and create a PDL file to 
>create/modify a PHD?  If you just want to examine the existing PHD then
>QSHOW 
>will do the job.  If you want to create a PDL file from a DB schema then do
>an 
>SQL dump and use TPU to convert the syntax. 
> 
>I hope that helps 
> 

Hi Robert,

What I'd like to do is create or otherwise obtain a PHD that describes the
PHD files, so that you report on its contents with Quiz.  While it's
certainly possible to do this on PDL source generated with Qshow, you need
to come of with the code to parse it and do the reporting.  It'd be a lot
easier to invoke Quiz and do something like this (these are made-up names):

$SETDICT POWERHOUSE
$QUIZ
>ACCESS ELEMENTS LINK TO RECORDS
>SELECT IF ELEMENT_TYPE = "DATE"
> SORT ON RECORD_NAME
> REP RECORDS
> FOO AT RECORD_NAME COUNT

This was possible on the HP where the dictionary is stored in an Architect,
which uses an Image database as its file repository.  On Alpha/Vax systems,
the dictionary is stored in five RMS files, and there is no dictionary that
describes the layout of these five files, at least for now.  Evidently this
information will be provided in 710G, but we won't be upgrading to that
version.



Mike