Challenges During Conversion Of Cobol To Oracle Database In Multan Electric Power Company

Abstract

The Multan Electric Power Company (MEPCO) was using open VMS operating system to run high level language (COBOL) for its business purpose. The operating system is command based which was needed to replace with the graphical user interphase. The data warehouse was converted from sequential, indexed and relative file organization to an Oracle relational file system. The special programs were written to translate COBOL to Oracle database. This shifting of database was necessary to support centralization of data, reducing operational cost and to adopt latest advancement in the technology. It turned out the MEPCO as one of the largest company getting benefited from modern application softwares. This manuscript describes how to test the functional equivalency of updated and old applications, as well as the main testing obstacles and the lesson learned along the course of running and maintaining the updated application. Functionally equally working systems were developed but experience staff, parallel and vertical software feature development, staff trainings, troubleshooting, restriction on database and real time updation of information were always challenging.