To help companies migrate applications from mainframes to lower-cost platforms, Micro Focus introduced this week its next generation of mainframe migration tools: Studio Enterprise Edition and Server Enterprise Edition 6.0 SP1.

Studio EE, a suite of graphical tools for business application migration, and Server EE, a tool for deploying migrated applications on a new platform, now include a host compatibility option for SQL Server.

“This option increases the support for different SQL Server syntaxes,” said Richard Pegden, head of product marketing at Micro Focus. The option makes the data part of a migration easier to achieve when moving, he said.

“Over time, different vendors have built up their own SQL syntaxes,” Pegden explained. “So, as applications are migrated off the mainframe, there are some SQL statements [which are commands to access data from a database] that perhaps need to be edited as part of that migration in order to fit the syntax on the environment they are moving to.”

By supporting more SQL syntaxes, Studio EE and Server EE now reduce the need to manually change code during migration, which cuts down migration time and increases the amount of moved syntaxes, he added.

On top of its support for the COBOL programming language, the tools now support PL/I.