To Whom It May Concern:

I use DYNA-MatCH on almost a daily basis in open shop, and in just about every application that I install into production. It takes me 5 or 10 minutes to accomplish tasks that would have taken me half a day in COBOL.

What's really nice about DYNA-MatCH is that there's virtually no debugging. With a couple of simple control statements, you've got an entire program that can match your two files and update your master file. There's no compiling of the program (the expense of compiling a program runs about $10 a shot). The old way, you write the program and compile it; then you've got errors you have to go back and fix. If you don't have a variable name spelled right or something, you have to go back and fix the error, then recompile. You have so many more steps to go through. All your logic has to be tested. With DYNA-MatCH you don't have any of that. It's just a couple of simple statements­you run it, look at the results, they're good and you're done.

I use it mostly for mass updates to files in open shop­for two file matching to pull data from one file and put it on another file. To me that's the most powerful function.

It should be called DYNAMITE because it's a pretty powerful little piece of software. I despise writing two file match programs in COBOL. It's cumbersome, tricky logic. You have to worry about which file ends first and if one file ends first what to do with the data from the other file. It's real easy to mess up in COBOL. You don't have to worry about all that with DYNA-MatCH. All you have to worry about is which file you want to be the "A" file (master) and which file you want to be the 'B" file (transaction). Then decide if you want to output everything, just matched, unmatched, etc. One statement tells what you want to match on, a few FIELD statements, and there you go.

It's useful in all the systems we support­financial, manufacturing, inventory, labor and payroll. I couldn't think of an application where it wouldn't be useful. There are three programmers here and we all use it. I've personally put at least a couple dozen jobs into production with DYNA-MatCH steps (many with multiple DYNA-MatCH steps).

I use DYNA-MatCH frequently for cleaning up files. We're constantly getting requests for "one shot" programs and ad hoc reports and it comes in really handy there. We're more of a maintenance organization so we don't install a lot of new things into production. But for the things that I've rewritten (I rewrote a costing system and an inventory system), I used DYNA-MatCH throughout. I could have gone to IMS data bases to get the information I needed. I could have done IMS batch COBOL programs and done direct calls to IMS databases to gather the data. All the segments of our databases are downloaded every night to flat files. It was a lot quicker to use DYNA-MatCH and grab the data off of the flat files­quicker and cheaper. I've probably used it 100 times in open shop if not more.

I don't know what I'd do without DYNA-MatCH. Sometimes I think that if I left CSC and went to another company that didn't have it I'd BE LOST AT FIRST, UNTIL i GOT MY HEAD BACK TOGETHER ON HOW TO WRITE TWO FILE MATCHES. With DYNA-MatCH I don't have to worry about that.