DSXchange

I have a new challenge, to get data out of a (hierarchical) TOTAL database running on Progress on a Perkin-Elmer mainframe. There is no ODBC access nor any "native API". There is only server edition of DataStage available. FTP access is available.

Has anyone ever successfully achieved this? I'm sure it's doable, but don't want to reinvent the wheel unnecessarily.

I've worked with Progress before - shouldn't be too difficult to extract the data into flat files and FTP the data over. I am very surprised that there is a mainframe implementation of Progress; and probably 90% of the denizens here have never even heard of Perkin-Elmer. That name belongs in the annals of computers, somewhere between Multics and Primos

Perkin-Elmer, I have not heard that name in 20 years. Progress can easily dump to tab or comma delimited files but you need a programmer. Progress has arrays in columns or multivalues if you will. So good luck.

Turns out Progress was a red herring, and that describing the P-E as a "mainframe" probably wishful thinking. It's the Perkin-Elmer port of TOTAL only. Had a meeting with them today; they have three utilities that can dump the data from the hierarchical database into flat formats as well as COBOL programs (whence "mainframe"?) for the same task - we can get metadata from the copybook.

So I do think it will be doable without too much effort. We'll have another meeting later this week, and I've asked them to bring along source metadata (TOTAL) and planned target design (DB2/400).

Still interested to hear if anyone has done this already. Not that interested in reminiscences!