PDL to SQL

[Bill D Michael]

Conrad Whittall said:

>A major capability of Axiant is its ability to read PDL source code and
>to create SQL data definitions based on your existing files and record
>structures. Axiant will also advise you of issues that you might need
>to correct before you can successfully move to a relational database
>(naming conventions, normalization, etc.) -- it can even suggest and
>automatically implement meny of the changes for you. Not only can it
>do this with your data definitions but it can also apply the same
>changes to your PowerHouse programs.

We used Axiant as the first step in our conversion, but a great deal of
manual effort was also required. Axiant apparently looks only at the
ELEMENT definitions, not at the ITEM definitions, so if they differ, your
table winds up with the wrong field size. Also, Axiant's decisions on what
is a DATETIME, what is VARCHAR (vs CHARACTER) etc. were not to our liking;
there are too many bugs in 8.20D3 to have most fields be VARCHAR, and
Oracle does not like it's date fields to be zero. Our naming conventions
were already "clean", and we rejected all the normalization suggestions in
favor of our own. We were never sucessful in getting it to do anything
useful to our PowerHouse code.

If you have Axiant already, by all means use it, and if you've got a lot of
files to convert it may be worth buying a copy - but I'm not all that sure
that it'll actually save you any time over manually writing the SQL. The
SQL generation portion of an RMS-to-Oracle conversion is a very small part
anyway, measured in days; you'll spend much more time (months!) trying to
get 8.20xx to function correctly...

Bill



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