I’ve had experience when I migrated a cobol system to Linux (patch abi) so I saw that its data is plain text, even I executed scripts to get/put data to manipulate it.
I think is an a good idea to test it (postgres_fw), but I need an server test where we can do that.
Someone interested on it?
If you’re looking for a way to migrate data files to PostgreSQL, you may look into the isMigrate tool that Veryant offers with isCOBOL. It allows you to read files from a list of different formats and writes in the format you need. The migration uses a bridge program generated using XML files that contain the underlying structure of the file(s) you want to migrate. Then it’s a pretty simple process to migrate the data.
I do not want to spoil Veryant’s business, but here a free-of-charge solution for about the same:
Reads COBOL files describes by copybooks, and exports them as XML, CSV etc.