What would the best technology/language choice be for converting MARK IV data manipulation programs?

Question

My office relies on dozens of old MARK IV programs on a mainframe to pull down and manipulate data from a DB2 database into mainframe files (which eventually turn into excel spreadsheets at the moment).

I have been tasked with starting the conversion process - understanding these programs and moving the logic over to a modern technology that more people in the office will be able to maintain. The options at my disposal are:

• SAS 9.2
• SPSS 17.0
• Anything in Visual Studio 2008 (most likely VB or C#)

Since these programs are data manipulation focused, I was thinking SAS would be the best choice, but I was looking for some more experienced opinions on this. Thanks!

Answer 1

I don't know much about SAS or SPSS. I can say that if you go with .net/visual studio you will have access to a much larger support community if you encounter difficulty with something. Any .Net language should be capable of what you need. Keep in mind however, that like all C-derived languages, .Net has floating point rounding error, such that if you evaluate 1.3 * 1.3 == 1.69, the expression will evaluate to false. This usually isn't important, but it may be a factor for you if you need exact precision.