From: Dave Burt <dave@...>
Date: 2006-06-15T19:57:52+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby and Cobol

Peter Palmer wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Unfortunately that won't work :(
> 
> Whilst we can extract the data and import it into say Oracle or Postgres,
> the problem is that the live system uses the cobol files. The acuCOBOL SQL
> interface is far too slow to switch to Oracle directly and so Oracle is
> only used for data mining.

Do you have a data format specification? In my limited experience, COBOL
data files tend to be a simple fixed-length record format, which should
make it easy to extract data using scan(/.{length}/) and pack/unpack.

Cheers,
Dave