[Info-vax] VMS Cobol - GnuCOBOL

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 2/26/2023 3:14 PM, bill wrote:
> On 2/26/2023 10:05 AM, Johnny Billquist wrote:
>> On 2023-02-25 13:00, Neil Rieck wrote:
>>> comment: ISAM was important elsewhere on VMS including the fact that 
>>> SYSUAF.DAT was indexed
>>
>> Yeah, I don't think anything in RSTS/E or RSX on the system level used 
>> indexed files. VMS I know a little bit less, but since RMS integration 
>> went deeper in VMS, I'm not surprised if more things made use of it.
> 
> Today, it is hard to imagine any reason for using ISAM/VSAM.  Small
> Simple Databases like MySQL/MariaDB or SQLite can do a better job
> and in most cases are probably just as easy to understand.

RDBMS would be the default today. SQLite for embedded.
MySQL/MariaDB or PostgreSQL or commercial for server.

There are still use cases for ISAM or to use a more
modern term NoSQL key value store. But I believe there
is little intersection between those use cases and
the use cases for Cobol today. Cobol is used for
money and money is stored in RDBMS.

Arne