Tool for viewing and editing file on OpenVMS

[Notilus007]

Hello,

Does anyone know about a smart and advanced tools that can view or edit files on an HP OpenVMS system, similar to the FileAID tool that works on IBM Mainframe?

[Hoff]

IBM environments are very different from OpenVMS environments, and there are comparatively few tools and techniques that have much in common. 

There is no analog to File-AID in OpenVMS, nor is one likely to be deployed.  (Based on some rummaging around to see what File-AID provides.  (I found some Compuware File-AID/RDX pieces, and there appear to be various products in this File-AID product set.)

There are a few tools available with the third-party database packages that might be of interest, such as the tools that are part of Oracle Classic and Oracle Rdb and with other third-party database packages, and (as is a common case) there are remote-access tools that can be utilized via ODBC and JDBC connections into a third-party database server running on OpenVMS.

The older approaches involved InstantSQL (formerly part of Rdb, now retired) or DATATRIEVE, which is a command-line tool that can perform various operations and reporting.  Neither of these two tools is particularly analogous to File-AID.

I would encourage you to always include the OpenVMS version and platform when posting a question (as details and features vary), the name and version of any relevent third-party software (the databases, for a question such as this one) and a description of what you want in addition to any references to third-party tools or techniques or features of third-party platforms; to provide some background that might be recognized by the folks on the target platform.  (The crowd here knows VMS and has some familiarity with VMS databases, but whether the folks know another platform is going to be hit or miss.)

And specifically for questions around database work and tools on OpenVMS, you will want to work with the database vendor for your particular database.  If you're running Oracle Classic or Oracle Rdb, you'll want to visit the Oracle web site and the Oracle Metalink support area, for instance.

[Bob Blunt]

There have been many editing and data management tools written for VMS and OpenVMS through the years, some public domain, some proprietary.  While there are probably enough that someone could piece together a solution similar to FileAID it really doesn't seem like you could ever find something like that in one place, the One Ring so to speak..

Unfortunately your description (and the CompuWare site) are far too vague to honestly understand what FileAID is, what it does (and how) so trying to find a solution that does similar things on VMS is nearly impossible.  It sounds like FileAID is part editor, part dataset manipulator, part expert database tool...  It slices, it dices, it juices, it blends, it mixes...

Put another way?  In order to find it you have to know what to look for.

bob

[Craig A Berry]

If this involves RMS indexed files, you'll likely want DIX (http://www.oooovms.dyndns.org/dix/), but as other posters have said, there's not nearly enough to go on here to know what you're actually using or what you want to do with it.

[GuentherF]

There is a very mature product called SmartStar (www.smartstar.com) which allows to view/edit/report  for RMS, Rdb or Oracle(8...10g) files. Runs on OpenVMS/Alpha (V7.3...V8.4) and OpenVMS/Itanium (v8.2...V8.4).

/Guenther

[Mike Kier]

Not knowing anything about the IBM-oriented utility, I can echo Craig's recommendation of DIX for viewing/editing/dumping about any kind of normal VMS files, particularly those that have non-ASCII fields (dates, various Integer and floating point fields, etc.) and it has an extraordinarly rich scripting capability (I just wish it had a reference manual and tutorial).  It's especially nice for us as a Fortran shop since the record definition syntax is similar enough to Fortran that many of our INCLUDE files with structure definitions are useable with almost no modification - it even handles the UNION/MAP multiple record formats in a single file issues.

We are also heavy users of S1032, a commercial product now from Rocket Software (formerly System House or Praxa).  It requires the files to be loaded into Datasets or Databases but provides a very robust relational query, manipulation, and reporting capability.  I don't know what the decision process was (way before my time here) but the folks here preferred it to Datatrieve, which we also have, and standardized on it well over 20 years ago for some applications.

[Notilus007]

I will try to be more specific.

In our organization we use RMS files with HP CDO record layout,

and we are looking for a tool that can help us view / edit a RMS file.

By giving it the file's full name & path and the full name & path of the CDO record layout,

the file record fields' name, size , and value will be displayed on the screen, one record at a time. 

We work on HP OpenVMS 8.4 Itanium system with Oracle RDB 7.2 database and HP COBOL 2.8 as primary programming language.

[Fekko Stubbe]

Mike,"I just wish i had a reference manual". All commands are described in the help. Are you missing something or are you looking for a "User manual"?
Fekko Stubbe (author of DIX)

[Mike Kier]

I replied to Fekko via mail to not drag this off-topic - thanks for asking Fekko!