Hi Peter,
In Visual COBOL you can use embedded EXEC SQL statements to access a database. There are a number of options to use depending on the vendor of the database. The easiest is if the database has an available ODBC driver then you can use OpenESQL to connect to an available DSN that points to the database and then your program can access the rows via database statements.
This is covered in the documentation here:
There are also some videos that you can watch located in this playlist:
The following is a real simple example that opens a connection to a SQL Server database and then uses a cursor to return a rowset containing all rows in the Customer table and then allows the user to fetch forward or backward depending on a selected option.
$set sql(dbman=odbc)
identification division.
program-id. Program1.
environment division.
configuration section.
data division.
working-storage section.
01 func-code pic x value spaces.
exec sql include sqlca end-exec.
exec sql include customers end-exec.
procedure division.
exec sql
connect to 'sqlodbc32'
end-exec
exec sql
declare custcursor dynamic cursor for select
a.customerid
,a.companyname
,a.contactname
from dbo.customers a
end-exec
exec sql
open custcursor
end-exec
if sqlcode = 0
perform until exit
display "Enter 'N'= Next, 'P'= Prev, 'Q'= Quit"
accept func-code
evaluate function upper-case(func-code)
when "N"
perform 100-fetch-next
when "P"
perform 110-fetch-prev
when "Q"
perform 120-quit
exit perform
end-evaluate
end-perform
else
display "open cursor failed"
end-if
goback.
100-fetch-next.
exec sql
fetch next custcursor into
:customers-customerid
,:customers-companyname
,:customers-contactname:customers-contactname-null
end-exec
perform 200-display-row.
110-fetch-prev.
exec sql
fetch previous custcursor into
:customers-customerid
,:customers-companyname
,:customers-contactname:customers-contactname-null
end-exec
perform 200-display-row.
120-quit.
exec sql
close custcursor
end-exec
exec sql disconnect current end-exec.
200-display-row.
if sqlcode = 0
display customers-customerid
display customers-companyname
display customers-contactname
else
if sqlcode = 100
display "row not found"
end-if
end-if.
end program Program1.