Hello everyone,
The company I work for has it’s data stored in a Unidata database that maintained at our corporate headquarters. The front end of the data is a mainframe program called PRO III (maybe some of you have heard of that) that is maintained by an outside company. All the reports that we get are just some predefined reports that have been set up that are your typical mainframe type reports. If you want to get a simple inventory report for a specific location you end up with a 900 or so page report that gives you ten times more than what you need and you have to sort through all this garbage to get only the information you want. We may only want Part #, description, quanity and bin, but we end up getting all the other crap we don’t on this particular report such has PO#, Vender , blah blah blah. The entry for each part# takes up 3 or 4 lines and the reports is printed landscape so you only end up with only 8 or 10 part numbers per page. If the reports only showed the field we needed, this 900 or so page reports would only be 60 or 70.

I have contacted the vendor and asked if there was a way I could get extracts from the Undata database. These extracts could be XML, CSV or any other format – I can handle just about any type. I also asked if it would be possible to connect to the database via ODBC so I could create my own sql and reports. The answer I got is “No, Unidata is a totally different animal than what you are used to.”

Could someone fill me in on UNIDATA just a little. Are ODBC connections or data extracts not possible with UNIDATA? I would like to tell them they are full of BS but I would like to be able to back up that with a little information

Thanks