I can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas.
I'm frightened of the old ones. -- John Cage

 There comes a time in the evolution of every mainframe legacy system when it is necessary to change the format of a major element. This is often the result of size restrictions or technological advances. In a perfect world, changing the length of a zip-code field from 5 to 10 characters would seem trivial. Find all of the fields named zip-code, change their length, end of story.

The Problem

Unfortunately we don't live in a perfect world. In a legacy system that dates back several decades, the zip-code field might be called anything from ZPC, zip, postcode or maybe codice as coded in a system outsourced to some now extinct Italian firm. Sometimes the field that needs to be expanded is actually several separate fields as in a telephone number or date (remember Y2K?).

So you have to deal with expanding a field from 5 to 10 bytes, taking into account all the occurrences, the transfer of the data from fields to OS files, and updating a database record. You think you've covered all the problems in your deeply detailed analysis and then a programmer confronts you with a COBOL move by reference which h/she found in several dozen programs that extract the zip code from a large 200 byte field called client-addr by position and moves it to another field called cust-details.

The Solution

It's not the actual field change that should frighten you, but the 30 years of unpredictable coding that manipulates the field.  That's where MOST Technologies' OnTarget Suite comes to the rescue. OnTarget runs an Impact analysis that traces the chain of data from its source to its final destination. In this way, all movement and stumbling blocks are analyzed, reported, and marked for conversion. Then OnTarget's conversion module automatically makes the required changes.  

MOST- - the professional mainframe specialists!

Don't let old ideas frighten you. OnTarget is built to deal with them. MOST Software Technologies’ employees have a combined hundreds and hundreds of years of mainframe experience. Find out more about the best practices in mainframe modernization by filling out our contact form today.