From COBOL to SQL through program transformation and XML

The cost of maintaining legacy software systems has spiralled and their maintenance became a burden for many organisations. In this paper we present the first prototype of the LOBS-COQ system that attempts to transform COBOL legacy systems into relational database schema and produce SQL statements for data querying. The approach first transforms the COBOL source code into XML files, which are then processed to create tables and develop SQL statements. Frames are used to develop the SQL statements. COBOL statements are parsed and the information extracted is used to fill the frames’ slots