Moving a Catalog to a Database[7]

If you are deploying an existing JCL catalog and its associated data files to a database that has been configured for the Micro Focus Database File Handler (MFDBFH), you may need to update the catalog entries in order to locate the referenced files when they are housed in the database.

You could update each catalog entry manually in order to locate the files once they have been deployed to the database, but that would be a long, labor-intensive process, and could be prone to error. An easier method is to use the mfdbcatc utility, which is designed to assist in deploying an existing catalog and files to a database.

The utility is a two-stage process, where it scans the existing catalog and files on disk, creating some intermediate files for the next process, and then it will create a new catalog and a script file intended to deploy the files to the required database location. The actual deploying of the catalog to the database is performed by another MFDBFH utility - dbfhdeploy.

A disk-based catalog references data files in a number of different way: it locates files relative to its location, based on the value of an environment variable or Fileshare location, or uses hard-coded entries to a specific location. mfdbcatc attempts to maintain the existing structure of your catalog where possible; for example, if you have data files in <CATALOGFOLDER>/DATA/ on disk, the new catalog deploys those files to the DATA folder in the database, updating the catalog to reflect that. For other cases, where file location is not as straight-forward, you can edit the configuration files produced in stage one of the mfdbcatc process, so that files are relocated within the bounds of your database structure when stage two is run.