Instantly digestible error messages are so important. Why do so many systems have such pathetic error handling routines? And sometimes, none at all?
If you want to make a Cobol system, write your system with flat files and use Cobol. Or C. The system will run much faster than using a database.
In some shops, to understand the system, you look everywhere, except at the data model. It’s the “meaningless model”.
Do you use the VIN, or the license plate to identify a car in the DMVs system? The choice has huge implications!
There are a lot of systems using Cobol out there these days. Even though the systems were built on top of Oracle databases from the start!
MUCK: Massively Unified Code-Key, Generic Three Table Data Models cause lots of problems: Awful performance, Pivots, Require multiple inline views, data type Issues, really complex inserts, increased people time, cost, and create a Cobol system. Just say no!
The database “design” was a binary tree! The nodes were actually being used for both storage, and indexing! In order to find any data, you had to write a routine to traverse the tree. That is, instead of using standard tables, and standard SQL Select statements, with Where clauses to filter the rows.