[Info-vax] Coding with/without RDBMS

[Jan-Erik Söderholm]

Den 2021-10-23 kl. 09:57, skrev Lawrence D’Oliveiro:
> On Wednesday, October 20, 2021 at 5:34:36 AM UTC+13, Bill Gunshannon wrote:
>> On 10/18/21 10:07 PM, Arne Vajhøj wrote:
>>>
>>> If companies started with no code at all, then I suspect that
>>> very few would pick Cobol today.
>>>
>> And why is that? Is it because the newer languages are better
>> for the tasks COBOL was designed for or is is it because academia
>> stopped teaching it and chose to attack it vehemently.
> 
> Did it ever occur to you both might be aspects of the same reason?
> 
> I mentioned previously how COBOL was supposedly designed for “business” needs, yet it didn’t take long to become apparent that it had become woefully out of step with actual “business” needs, when businesses became more dependent on SQL databases instead of ISAM files; COBOL was born in the era of ISAM files, and never really adapted to be being able to cope in a very flexible way with SQL.
> 

Again, there is no major difference in how SQL is handled in Cobol
than in any other compiled language. Scripting languages might have
some other run-time mangling of SQL commands, but that can be done
from Cobol also using a dynamic-SQL interface. But that has worse
performance since the SQL has to be processed and "compiled" at each
call. Embedded SQL using a SQL-precompiler does that at compile-time.
At run-time you do not analyse, compile and execute any SQL at all.

And there is no major difference in Cobol between ISAM and SQL.
I'd say that in most cases the SQL coding is cleaner and easier.
At least if ISAM=RMS and SQL=Rdb.