So you want to do a 7 table join?

My usual advice when faced with a query like this is to break it up into simpler parts. Just because you can do something with a single query, doesn't mean that you should. Temporary tables (or QMF's SAVE DATA) are an excellent way to achieve this.

Why FTP?

I have never understood the fascination with FTP. If all you want to do is transfer files between z/OS and a Windows workstation, then ISPF's Work Station Agent (WSA) works great. It's simple to use, fast and secure. Best of all, you can automate it using Rexx or any other language that supports ISPF dialog services.

See this link if you want to learn more about WSA.

Still not convinced? See this one too.

Cobol scope terminators

All the scope terminators are great, but I especially like END-IF because it allows you to avoid programming in SENTENCES. IMO, the designers of Cobol took the natural language metaphor a bit too far when they introduced the concept of logic flow delimited by periods (aka "full stops").

IMO the lack of END-IF in early versions of Cobol severely damaged the reputation of the language. I think that is the reason why Dijsktra said:

"The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense.”

END-IF is easily the most important innovation ever made to the language in the 28 years that I've been working with it.

Some of my best friends are DBAs

Don't judge DBA's too harshly. They're not programmers, and may never have actually coded a cursor themselves.

IPT vs ISPF

I find this link interesting because IBM appears to be rubbishing ISPF in order to promote IPT

ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/software/...Comparison.pdf

Straw men walking! 

Feeling young

Hearing old timers talk about TSO edit makes me feel young. (A rare pleasure that is getting rarer).

I was one of the first generation of programmers to have the privilege of using SPF right at the start of my career. During my entry level training, the topic of TSO was glossed over; I never even had to learn TSO Edit.

This was back in 1981, when it was called SPF (Structured Programming Facility). A few years later it was re-branded as ISPF (Interactive Structured Programming Facility...."Interactive" being the buzzword of the day).

Then, sometime in the late 1980s ISPF became "Integrated Systems Productivity Facility". "Integrated" was a fashionable buzzword at the time, and IBM decided that ISPF wasn't just for "Programming" any more.

Nowadays the official name of the product is "Interactive System Productivity Facility". Whatever happened to "Integrated"? Perhaps I have my chronology wrong.

Your memories may vary.  (Mine vary from day to day).

I think I first saw option 3.4 in 1986 +- 1 year or so. I didn't like it very much...real programmers knew all of their data set names, so who needs 3.4? (Twenty years later, I am hooked on SimpList, a product which is like 3.4 on steroids).

I remember when you had to hit RETURN rather than ENTER in order to use a Jump function. I also remember complaining when they changed that, but I soon got used to it.

How long should a process take?

"How long is a piece of string?" may be the flippant answer, but it's not a very useful one.

It is possible to predict, with a fair amount of accuracy, how long a process will take if you know how many records must be processed, what is being done to them, what type of machine it is running on, how many i/o buffers are available etc etc

Or, you can run the input file through DFSORT or other high performance utility.

If DFSORT can process a file in 10 minutes (even if it's not doing exactly the same processing...most business applications are I/O bound) and my Cobol program can do it in 15, then I don't spend much time tuning the Cobol because it is probably about as good as it is going to get.

That is just a rule of thumb of course. Your mileage will vary.