Defining Columns on Repeating Data Items

The OCCURS clause in COBOL data definitions presents a challenge when designing relational tables because the concept of the OCCURS clause is not available in the relational model.

The default behavior for subscripted items is to generate multiple rows for a COBOL record, one for each subscript of a data item. There are a number of ways of changing this behavior in the augmentation process - refer to Specifying Treatment of the OCCURS Clause for the different techniques.

Within the table definitions, if you are creating columns for individual subscripts, you must bind them to the specially-created conditions that were created in the file definition.