My Understanding of the Use of Micro Focus Relativity Designer

The data in COBOL source files, whether sequential, relative or indexed, can be retrieved by the COBOL source program for which it is designed.  The results will be laid out based on the structure of the COBOL program.  For the results to be presented another way to gain new information, the program structure has to be rewritten.  Many IT service organizations use sometimes hundreds of COBOL programs with millions of lines of code to provide consistent, reliable, and secure service to their clients.  Any rewrite of COBOL programs and codes to get another desired result could cost service providers an enormous amount of downtime to their clients, probably loss of data security, and a significant amount of developers' time and effort.  One service provider estimated that it would take four program developers at least four years to reprogram the structures of all their COBOL programs at an enormous cost.  The return on investment (ROI) would not be worth the effort.

Micro Focus  has developed a tool, the Relativity Designer, to extract the structured data in COBOL programs and to present it in an Excel spreadsheet format.  The neat thing about this approach is that the Cobol program structure remains intact and is not broken in any way.  The data structure of the Cobol program also remains intact.

In Excel format, the data can be analyzed by means of tables, graphs, charts, etc. to assess relationships between various elements in the COBOL source data.  Secure data in Excel files can be passed on to secure clients of service providers to be used by them to retrieve relationships of interest to them.  Relativity has a built in measure to allow only authorized personnel to access the Relativity tool and the results of the Excel spreadsheets.

Recently, I had the opportunity to work with Relativity Designer on some of my clients' COBOL source data as well as on the Relativity Samples provided by Micro Focus.  I found Relativity Designer very easy to use and I would like to share my experience in using the tool.

My next blog will detail the use of Relativity.