Continuing to champion COmmon Business-Oriented Language in the face of critics who have consigned COBOL to the legacy software "Where are they now?" pile, Veryant has announced the availability of vCOBOL Enterprise 2011 Release 3.

Released as a direct alternative to mainframe and legacy Micro Focus COBOL dialects, vCOBOL aims to provide software developers with a means of deploying COBOL applications across Linux, UNIX, and Windows systems.

While some have long since committed COBOL to the legacy bin, more open-minded analysts and industry commentators have perhaps realized that "legacy" as a label also denotes software that "still works" and so has held in place. With more than 200 billion lines of COBOL code still in existence and a shelf life that often ranges from 10 to 30 years, COBOL applications can access terabytes of data in today's modern businesses.

So what can Veryant now bring to the contemporary, multi-functional COBOL table? The company has made much of a new migration utility and the option to access relational databases through the Structured Query Language for Java (SQLJ). Organizations that migrate COBOL applications and relational databases, such as IBM DB2, from the mainframe to open systems can now take advantage of a new application migration utility to simplify the transition. Relational databases, such as IBM DB2 database software, require additional Embedded Structured Query Language (ESQL) syntax that is not required on the mainframe. The new release of vCOBOL also prepares mainframe COBOL source code for open systems by automatically addressing these COBOL/ESQL differences.

According to Veryant, in the post migration phase vCOBOL now offers companies the choice of accessing relational databases, such as IBM DB2 or Oracle, through JDBC or through the SQLJ convention. SQLJ calls are "typically easier to write" and more concise than JDBC calls. Because SQLJ leverages static queries and a precompiler, SQLJ calls often run faster than JDBC. On internal tests, Veryant experienced greater than 50% faster performance when reading records with SQLJ.