We have both native COBOL and Visual COBOL projects that access ISAM files. A friend of mine who is an ACUCOBOL developer used Acu4GL to turn ISAM files into database tables and then access them as a relational database. The COBOL code didn't change but behind the scenes Acu4GL turned read and write statements into sequel queries. Also, when a file was opened output, Acu4GL would create a database table instead of an empty ISAM file so he didn't have to spend a lot of time defining database tables.
We are looking for a similar product that will work for Micro Focus COBOL. Our application uses about 200 ISAM files, a number of which have multiple record formats, and we are looking for a way to convert them to a database without too much work. Once converted, we want our COBOL read, write, etc statements to be interpreted as sequel queries without having to make code changes.
We're looking into Micro Focus Relativity, which might be an option, but it uses ISAM files and allows applications to access them as though they were a relational database.