Mainframe, MVS and zOS Discussion

Datacom: Datacom/DB is a relational database management system for the mainframes. It was originally developed by Insyte Datacom and later acquired by Applied Data Research, however, it is now owned by CA Technologies which renamed it to CA-Datacom/DB and later to CA Datacom/DB.

• In this Data is stored in the form of databases, which can have one or more keys.
• Access is through ‘embedded” datacom calls in high level languages, or through "data-query".
• This is NOT a Relational Database Manager or even a sophisticated database manager
• This is a filing system, for better organization of data
• It has the basic features of a filing system - keys, indexes etc.
• It has locking features, to prevent “lost updates”

Access may be thru embedded calls or via SQL (Dataclom has supported SQL for more than 20 years).

The main reason ADR bought Insyte was because they were in the process of inventing IDEAL. IDEAL is a 4gl that needed an underlying database engine. Instead or writing one, they bought Insyte.

IDEAL also runs on DB2, so if a client wants to change database engine, they can preserve their application investment.