[Info-vax] Calling $CREPRC in COBOL

[David Jones]

On Sunday, July 3, 2022 at 4:05:05 PM UTC-4, seasoned_geek wrote:
> At any rate, there is no SQL that will let you put multi-typed records in a table. The "best" you could hope for is to have the primary key fields then a BLOB object one had to hack like we did in BASIC. You would be right back to CVT$% and RSET logic. (Didn't they drop RSET and LSET from the DEC BASIC specification at some point?)

A sensible schema for the database would obviate the need for multi-typed records. Different types
of data are normalized into different tables.

As an exercise, I wrote an SQLite program to load OpenVMS accountng.dat files into a database. One
table had the record header information and then each packet type had a table (with a column that
referenced the record header table). The SQLitefiles ended up slightly smaller than the source file, my
guess is that the many small integers in resource packets consume less than the 4 bytes per counter
in the original. There were also small metadata tables, such as one holding the RFA of the last record 
read -- loading the same file again will skip the previously read records and only add the subsequently
written records.