Migrating between environments

Most deployments consist of a development environment, one or more test environments, and a final production environment. You should create a separate data server and set of metadata catalogs for each of these environments.

You should use CDA to define your initial tables and views in the development environment. The ability to import COBOL copy books or PL/I include definitions accelerates the mapping process and makes it less error prone.

However, using CDA in the test and production environments might not be necessary or feasible depending on site security policies. If the test/production databases or files use the same COBOL or PL/I layouts that were referenced in the development environment, then using the metadata utility to populate the metadata catalogs might be a better alternative.

Using this approach, you use CDA or the metadata utility to generate the DDL as described in Managing individual catalog objects for the tables, views, alter, grant, and other statements that are required. Typically, minor tailoring of the CREATE TABLE statements and/or COMMENT ON statements is required because the DBD, PSB, and/or data set names that are referenced in development are different in test and production.

Often the names are unique enough to use simple find/replace operations or the DDL syntax is easy to read to identify the places that need to be changed.

When the required changes are made, the updated DDL can be placed under version control and then supplied as input to the metadata utility to populate the metadata catalogs of the test or production data server. The metadata utility separates the connect statement from the input DDL so that it is easy to define multiple CONNECT TO SERVER statements, select the correct one, and then identify the tailored input DDL to populate the metadata catalogs of the selected server.