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.
