FairCom RTG COBOL Edition User's Guide

FairCom RTG Ready-to-Go Products

User Guide
FairCom RTG COBOL Edition User's Guide
Audience:	Developers
Subject:	Installing and configuring FairCom RTG COBOL Edition
Copyright:	© Copyright 2024, FairCom Corporation. All rights reserved. For full information, see the FairCom Copyright Notice.

 You may notice references to “FairCom DB,” the database technology beneath FairCom RTG. Formerly called “c-treeACE^®” (Advanced Core Engine), this technology is the high-performance server that replaces your COBOL file system.

The FairCom RTG^® product line leverages the technology of the FairCom Database Engine. Before explaining the details of installation and configuration, this guide will describe the features common to the FairCom RTG products.

Because the FairCom RTG products are designed as direct replacements for the native file systems, they require little or no modifications to your application.

Note: FairCom RTG V3 is based on the latest version of the powerful FairCom Server. The version numbers returned from utilities may reflect the underlying core version number of this server, which is currently V12.

How FairCom RTG Empowers Your Applications

The FairCom RTG products allow you to enhance your existing COBOL applications by upgrading the native file system to the advanced FairCom Database Engine. This file system allows direct access to your files. By replacing the native COBOL file system with a specialized version of the FairCom DB Advanced Core Engine, FairCom RTG brings many of the benefits of FairCom DB to your COBOL applications:

• Transaction Processing
• Client/Server Architecture, Sophisticated Caching & Index Compression
• Multi-User Performance
• Cross Platform/Multi-Platform Portability
• Dynamic Backups
• Granular Cache Support
• Memory Files
• Minimal Resource Requirements
• Developer to Developer Support
• SQL Access to Your Data

To take advantage of the complete set of features available to FairCom DB developers, you may need to use the FairCom DB Professional SDK in addition to your COBOL application development. This allows you to use industry-standard APIs such as .NET, Java or C/C++. Contact FairCom to explore using FairCom DB Professional.

In This Chapter Documentation Overview Key Benefits of FairCom RTG COBOL Edition FairCom RTG Server Advantages FairCom RTG SQL Access for Advanced Data Query Extensive Alternative APIs and Drivers

Documentation Overview

Content: This manual contains topics to help you get up and running with your FairCom RTG product:

Audience: These topics are intended for system architects, developers, and administrators.

FairCom RTG requires very little developer effort (it is intended to require little or no changes to your application). Instead, most of your effort is in migrating your data and, if you desire SQL access, defining the record schema through an external XML file called an XDD.

For an overview of this manual and of the procedures you will perform, see the chapter titled FairCom RTG COBOL Edition Quick Start.

Key Benefits of FairCom RTG COBOL Edition

FairCom RTG provides many features for the application developer. Actual features may be limited based on particular license you have purchased. The complete list includes:

• No need to recompile applications.
• Quickly scale to thousands of users.
• Eliminate persistent data corruption with advanced transaction control. FairCom RTG Server includes industrial-quality on-line transaction processing (OLTP) features that guarantee ACID (atomicity, consistency, isolation, durability) properties of transactions that are transparently (to the application) activated on any table.
• Add SQL for native data records, including tables that have multiple schema definitions (redefined fields) in the same table. See Working with Multi-Record Virtual Tables. Multiple Record Virtual Tables in the c-treeDB Developer's Guide.
• Support for ACUCOBOL-GT Version 6.1.0 and later and isCOBOL,
• Support for Micro Focus COBOL and other COBOL dialects through the standard Callable File Handler interface (ExtFH).
• Support for RM/COBOL via the Btrieve interface.
• New Plug-In architecture allows you to extend their functionality with advanced modular capabilities such as HTTP Web Services for browser-based tools and replication.
• Integrated as an additional file system. The file and path management is transparent for both Vision and FairCom RTG files. Details for handling FairCom RTG files are specified in the FairCom RTG configuration file. See FairCom RTG File System Details in the FairCom RTG User's Guide.
• FairCom RTG and other file handlers can co-exist in the same application allowing on-the-fly data conversion from one file system to another.
• A multipurpose ctutil utility implements similar functionality as Vision's vutil utility as well as importing/exporting ASCII files created with the Btrieve butil utility.

Cross-platform support includes Windows, Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, AIX, HP-UX and others.

FairCom RTG Server Advantages

FairCom RTG is much more than another "COBOL driver." FairCom RTG is based on the full-featured FairCom Database proven in over 45 years powering thousands of mission-critical applications such as banking and financial transaction management, aviation flight plan coordination, package tracking, materials handling and factory automation, and health care office practice management. What do these have in common? They all depend on reliable 24/7 data integrity, advanced features and never sacrificing performance. FairCom RTG delivers these same advantages to your existing COBOL applications. This list only a peek into what your legacy applications can immediately gain from FairCom RTG.

Data integrity

• Advanced ACID-compliant transaction processing for guaranteed durability
• Tuned for specific OLTP workloads
• Automatic background flush
• Hot backups and forward roll capability
• Exquisite data locking modes

Data security and protection

• AES Encryption for data at rest
• TLS Encryption for data in flight
• User-based Access Controls

Performance from in-memory data caching

• Independent data and index caches
• Pre-load data for advance availability
• Index node compression
• Memory Files

Availability through Database Replication

• Create replica servers for reporting and disaster recovery
• Centralized management via browser-based tools
• Parallel replication for high-throughput replication
• Synchronous replication for immediate consistency
• User defined extension callbacks

Plug-ins for Advanced server side functionality

• Extended APIs and Protocols
• Data aggregation
• External integrations

Advanced Database Features

• CRUD Batch operations
• Record Update Callbacks (ISAM “triggers”)
• Partitioned files for rapid purging and archiving
• Conditional Indexes
• Data compression on disk
• Deferred indexing
• Table locks
• File Notifications
• User Defined Message Queues

Centralized Management

• Web apps
• Server quiesce and File Block

FairCom RTG SQL Access for Advanced Data Query

Once you've added the many FairCom RTG server features to your application suite, you'll want to take the next step to advanced data access. FairCom RTG includes a powerful SQL engine directly over existing legacy data. No data duplication to alternate databases. No data normalization processes. No ETL, Direct SQL query reporting over YOUR data. FairCom RTG is not a read only "ODBC Driver." FairCom RTG is complete, concurrent access with read-write functionality. Locking and transaction control is completely coordinated with existing application access. See you data in a whole new view with FairCom RTG SQL.

ANSI SQL Data access

• Advanced join engine for sophisticated data query
• Recursive (common table expression) queries
• Cross-database query
• Table Valued Functions
• Multi-row INSERT
• Sequence number generator

Add SQL Over Legacy Data

• Link COBOL and legacy ISAM tables to SQL engine
• Virtual tables over REDEFINES and multi-record tables

Full-text indexing and search

Server side processing

• Stored Procedures for reporting and business logic encapsulation
• Triggers for data validation and auditing
• User-Defined Scalar Functions for advanced data management

Data Security

• Granted column level permissions and User Roles via Groups
• Extensive View definitions restrict data access

Extensive Alternative APIs and Drivers

Once you centralize complete database management over your existing data, why not open it to modern APIs and frameworks, from both SQL and fast direct record access. FairCom RTG includes a full complement of drivers and APIs immediately ready to access your data. C, Java, .NET, Python? Your choice. Pick the access method best suited for your task and framework at hand.

ISAM Drivers and APIs

C, C++, Java, .NET, Python, REST

SQL Drivers

C, ODBC, JDBC, ADO.NET, Python, Node.js