What is ADABAS

jobseeker · New User Joined: 07 Mar 2005 Posts: 26

Can someone please guide me what is Adabas is and what its used for? heard its a database and used with Natural 4G Language, but need more details like advantages and real time usages.

enrico-sorichetti · Posted: Tue Feb 16, 2016 12:05 am

what about doing a bit of research Yourself ?
googling for adabas returned about 440000 hits
one of the first ones was
www.softwareag.com/corporate/products/adabas_natural/adabas/overview/default.asp

where You will find all You might want to know about it

Robert Sample · Posted: Tue Feb 16, 2016 1:04 am

Adabas is a data base -- and hence it can be used for whatever you want to use a data base for (manufacturing, inventory, sales, financials, etc). It has a COBOL interface, but much programming for Adabas is done in Natural, which is a language Software AG developed specifically for Adabas. Unlike many competitors, Adabas is NOT a relational data base and hence SQL is not generally used to access records in Adabas (although with the purchase of third-party products, SQL can be used with Adabas). Advantages / disadvantages and real time usage are fairly specific -- are you looking to write a paper on Adabas, or is this a homework assignment?

jobseeker · New User Joined: 07 Mar 2005 Posts: 26

No sir, I have to provide a speech about Adabas tomorrow. I heard Adabas was the fastest database ever produced. Is that applicable till now? I also learned from google that Adabas was originally developed for DOS/360, my question is, does it still work in z/OS? Also anyone have idea about the 3rd party tools needed to run SQL queries in ADABAS?

I heard adabas can handle large amounts of data more better than DB2. if anybody worked with Adabas here, tell me more about Advantages / disadvantages and real time usage, please.

Robert Sample · Posted: Tue Feb 16, 2016 2:00 am

Yes, Adabas runs just fine with z/OS -- at least through 2.1; I haven't had a chance to install z/OS 2.2 but presumably Adabas will run with it, too. The software has been updated over the years so what ran on DOS/360 in 1971 is not the same Adabas that is running today. But then, that is true for pretty much all software. The site I work with uses Adabas today with z/OS 2.1 in batch and CICS.

You are asking very broad, difficult-to-answer questions. What do you mean by "fastest" -- I/O time? CPU time? single record retrieval? million-record retrieval? The internal structure of Adabas is quite different than DB2 or other relational data bases; that can be good or bad. And, again, in your question what is "better"? Running an Adabas retrieval that does not use an indexed field may run MUCH worse than a DB2 query using an indexed column. The nature of an inverted list (Adabas) means that relatively more resources are required to add records to the data base than for a relational data base. So if your comparison includes adding records (instead of just retrieving them), you may well find that Adabas does worse than DB2 or Oracle.

There is a tremendous amount of research done on data base benchmarks every year and the main thing that everyone agrees on is that nobody agrees which is "fastest" or handles the most data or is "best".

And terminology is critical in IT, where similar terms may mean very different things. The phrase "real time" is most commonly associated with embedded systems, which would not usually be involved with Adabas or DB2 or Oracle or any other data base.

jobseeker · New User Joined: 07 Mar 2005 Posts: 26

Thanks a lot sir, you made my day. By fastest I mean the fetching time of the queries. I haven't used Adabas, hence I just quoted what I found in internet.

Rohit Umarjikar · Posted: Tue Feb 16, 2016 9:36 pm

Please refer TECHcommunity on Software AG website.