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From: pscaaf@vms.macc.wisc.edu (Ron Peterson)
Newsgroups: comp.databases
Subject: Re: COBOL and/or C in a large RDBMS env.
Message-ID: <1858@dogie.macc.wisc.edu>
Date: 12 Jun 89 13:27:14 GMT
Sender: news@dogie.macc.wisc.edu
Organization: University of Wisconsin Academic Computing Center
Lines: 27

In article <18@helios.se>, mats@enea.se (Mats Josefsson) writes...

>I am working in a large DBMS project. It is an on-line transaction
>system with very large amounts of data, several tens of Gigabytes.
>The size of the development phase is estimated to be in the order
>of 50 to 100 man years.  We're just starting up and have to make
>some decisions about the development environment, specifically
>on which 3GL(s) to use, C or C and COBOL.
>It has already been decided to use Ingres RDBMS.
>	"Should we use C for all non-OSL programming, or a
>	 combination of C and COBOL?"

I am using Ingres in a vax/vms environment where COBOL is not
available, although I am a COBOL programmer.
I use C, ReportWriter, QBF, SQL, and QUEL.  OSL was avoided to 
keep applications portable.  The C programs are used for batch
loading of "heads-down" keyed data to the database.  It is not
a transaction oriented system.
COBOL would be better than C for hard copy reports, but Report-
Writer is much faster for simple reports.  I would use C for 
everything else to ensure portability to other systems and 
efficiency(compiled code).  Ingres does not use packed decimal
data, which is handled nicely by COBOL.  COBOL also uses ISAM
files, which are not needed when a relational database is 
available.
A 50 to 100 man year project seems rather large, how many tables
and columns are involved?