Preferred Scenario

Our preferred scenario is to have the mainframe doing validation. The mainframe is accessible to our application via ODBC drivers. ODBC stands for Open Database Connectivity and allows Windows-based applications to connect to different types of databases using the same set of APIs. Many third-party vendors are supplying drivers. A sample of drivers available are:

ORACLE®

SQL

HP ALLBASE/SQL

HP IMAGE/SQL

CA-IDMS

CA-DATACOM

VSAM

DL/1

TOTAL

Ingres™

DB2™

IMS

IDMS

RMS

Informix®

SESAM/SQL

UDS/SQL

DEC™'s RDB

DSM (MUMPS)

RMS-11

NonStop™ SQL

ENSCRIBE

AS/400®


Client mainframe applications that use ODBC appear very similar to the traditional mainframe application, except they use a true database, instead of a table or file server.

The application is now only two parts—user interface and database system—instead of three.