>>Hello everybody!!!
>>I was just wondering if it would be possible to access an oracle table if the table was hosted on a mainframe? I have never heard of it being done but it was just a question that I had. The company that I work for is thinking about putting all of their data back on a mainframe. Why? I have no clue but any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
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>It all depends on what kind of access to the mainframe exists. I am sure there are ODBC drivers and such that can make data accessible to a PC from a mainframe or midframe environment. I have done loads of data access (reading and writing) using VFP against an IBM AS/400. The AS/400 has more ways to access data than I had time to analyze, including serving up AS/400 directories as if they were Windows shares, using D/400 (a Delphi-accessible data access layer), and using ODBC. I can imagine a mainframe might be stricter on security and protocol when it comes to accessing data, but I am sure there would have to be some sort of additions to the mainframe that exist to make the data accessible to the PC...
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>The mainframe access may be contingent upon having some sort of data-serving layer or program on the mainframe. Browse around IBM's site for a while and I am sure you will run across a lot of docs on data access for their back-end machinery...
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>JoeK

Sure, you just need the ODBC Drivers. I hit our Tandem which runs Tandem NonStop SQL. It works ok, but don't expect the performance you'd get running against an NT Server. In my case our mainframe is getting beatup by several thousand users at one time, so I guess I can't complain too much. Still some of the requests might take 60 seconds just to make a connection.