UV Software was formed in 1993 by Owen Townsend who worked on mainframes and UNIX at Unisys for 25 years. The software package is called the 'Vancouver Utilities for Unix and Linux'.
The Vancouver Utilities is a general purpose package of powerful data manipulation, file maintenance, and text scanning tools. These tools can perform whatever kind of raw data conversion you require, such as converting packed data to numeric, translating EBCDIC to ASCII, extracting data from complex variable length files, etc.
The package has been extensively used to convert Mainframe systems (JCL, COBOL,& DATA) to Unix or Linux systems. For details please see MVSJCL.htm or VSEJCL.htm in the Mainframe Conversion Library. Mainframe conversions are major projects and UV Software can supply onsite training and assistance in the use of these conversion tools.
Converting EBCDIC data files to ASCII is usually driven by the COBOL copybooks (record layouts). But if copybooks are not available the record layouts can be automatically generated by scanning the EBCDIC data, using the unique codes for packed decimal signs and zoned signs. For details please see MVSDATA.htm or VSEDATA.htm in the Mainframe Conversion Library.
This package fills the gaps in Unix & Linux system software that were provided by data management utilities on the mainframes. For example mainframes had DATA and SORT utilities that could process sequential and indexed files with fixed record lengths and without linefeeds. Unix & Linux systems have many utilities to process text files, but none to process these mainframe file types.
The 'uvcopy' and 'uvsort' utilities will process these files which are compatible with Micro Focus COBOL, C-ISAM, and D-ISAM. These utilities save you from having to write programs (in COBOL or C) to perform file maintenance and sorting on these indexed files and/or files without the linefeeds required by the Unix & Linux utilities. Please note that the Unix system sort utility is totally inadequate for sorting mainframe type files.
UV Software can also provide a data conversion service. You may have IBM EBCDIC files with packed decimal fields that you need to convert to ASCII character '|' pipe delimited files for loading relational databases. You can supply these files on magnetic tapes (DAT, 9 track reel, or 3480 cartridge) and UV Software can return the converted files on CDROM, including the SQL Loader control files. This process is automated if you can supply the COBOL copybook (data field descriptions).
The Vancouver Utilities are useful to any Unix Linux site that requires general purpose utilities for data conversion, record selection, sorting, and reporting including powerful table analysis. For example mailing list providers have made good use of the powerful record selection and table summary reporting.
The Vancouver Utilities include a powerful Report Program Generator. You can quickly create reports with multiple total levels, and unlimited summary tables sorted on desired fields. Ten lines of 'uvqrpg' code does the work of thousands of lines of COBOL code. These utilities provide UNIX systems with the functionality of IBM mainframe utilities such as QuikJob and Easytrieve.
These web pages are one example of the power and versatility of the uvcopy utility. Since the Vancouver Utility legacy documentation followed a consistent set of rules (for page headings, topic codes, etc), we wrote a uvcopy job to automatically convert the legacy documentation to HTML. Automatic generation of hypertext links saves countless hours of manual editing. For more details please see HTMLjobs.htm in the Pre-Programmed Jobs library.
Please call or E-mail for more information on any topic of interest to you.
Owen Townsend, UV Software Inc., 4667 Hoskins Rd., North Vancouver, BC, Canada, V7K2R3, Tel: 604-980-5434, Fax: 604-980-5404 Eml: owen@uvsoftware.ca, Web: http://www.uvsoftware.ca
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