Re: Saving CoBOL

In article <m4-dndWCMZ2C74fVnZ2dnUVZ_gWdnZ2d@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
Rick Smith <ricksmith@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:

[snip]

><
>http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=266128
>

[snip]

>Then a Cobol programmer looked at the job. "He extracted that into
>a flat file and used an old-fa****oned sort and was able to process the
>entire thing within a 20-minute period. I was blown away," Crego says.

This, I would argue, is not an advantage of the language but of learning 
how to see data-flows in different ways.  On my current site I came across

a few folks who were amused/worried by another team's difficulty in 
loading data into Oracle tables; it seemed like the daily 
transaction-load-and-update took 32 hours.

I said 'Do you want to see someone look uncomfortable? Just for laughs, in

the next meeting ask if they have sorted the input data into their 
table-key sequence, de-duping it for later research... oh, and ask if 
they've turned journalling off and whether they're using a single-row or 
bulk-load utility.'

The response was a kind of blank-faced 'whuh?' but they did it... and 
re****ted back that the database team liason (an Anderoid... errrr... 
Accenturion) got all fluster-faced and took notes and said he'd look into 
that... and suddenly there weren't day-and-a-half windows needed for daily

loads.

DD