IBM may often give the impression that it neglects the DOS/VSE operating system, but Oracle Corp, Belmont, California has no intention of following suit. The company yesterday announced availability of the Oracle SQL relational database and its associated development and end-user tools for IBM mainframes under DOS/VSE/SP, making it the first alternative to IBM’s own original relational offering, SQL/DS. Despite IBM’s occasional lapses of memory about the venerable operating system, Oracle points out that DOS/VSE/SP is still IBM’s most widely used executive, particularly on the small to mid-range 9370 and 4300 mainframes with over 55% of all IBM mainframe customers running variants, including many who run DOS/VSE under VM on the larger 3090 and 308X systems. CIC/VS is fully supported for high performance online systems by the new product, which Oracle reckons makes it the first relational database vendor to support all three IBM mainframe operating systems: MVS, VM and DOS – and Oracle applications and databases developed under any of the three will run without modification under any of the others. The company believes that DOS/VSE users will be particularly pleased by the SQL*QMX compatible superset of IBM’s Query Management Facility, and the SQL precompilers for Cobol, PL/I and Fortran. The new products are shipping now; pricing is according to computer size with licences – from $20,000 for the 9373-20 to $176,000 on the 3090-600E. Users need DOS/VSE/SP release 2.1 or above, as well as ICCF release 2.1. CICS/VS users need 1.6 up.
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