FairCom intros c-treeACE for COBOL developers

NEW YORK, USA: FairCom Corporation has announced a new solution for COBOL environments, c-treeACE for COBOL. This new technology exposes previously inaccessible silos of COBOL data to open access methods.

COBOL was one of the earliest high-level programming languages and is sometimes referred to as the language that automated business.

Recent studies show there are roughly 1.5 to 2 million active COBOL developers writing about 5 billion new lines of COBOL code every year. These estimates show COBOL applications processing 200 times more transactions per day than Google searches.

The nature of COBOL data and record definitions do not fit well in the traditional relational (SQL-based) database paradigm of strict table and record definitions. Consequently COBOL developers in recent years working on intra- and internet-based solutions have been forced to rewrite applications and to sacrifice performance and functionality, often at significant financial costs.

According to Francesco Cortinovis, managing director of FairCom Europe, "FairCom's c-treeACE for COBOL provides a unique and robust SQL access paradigm that marries COBOL standard I/O routines and SQL."

Cortinovis explains, "By design, a COBOL runtime will interface with any file system that stores and retrieves record buffers, using any indexes that may exist over these record buffers. That's exactly what FairCom’s c-treeACE ISAM interface does."

Evaldo Oliveira, FairCom’s general manager said, "From the pure COBOL point of view, c-treeACE for COBOL is just a straight, more advanced ‘native COBOL’ file system, with no limitations imposed on the COBOL programmer."

“Over the past few years FairCom has experienced greatly increased use in the financial sector, and we have already received significant interest in this new technology both in the U.S. and in Brazil,” Oliveira added.

Existing applications will work with c-treeACE for COBOL without the need to recompile and developers can choose which file system to use on a file-by-file basis.

Additionally c-treeACE for COBOL transparently allows access to data used by the COBOL application with direct SQL access or other FairCom interfaces like ODBC, JDBC, and ADO.NET drivers added the release.