Has anyone ever heard of the Tandem platform? I'm new to it and was wondering what other people thought about it and what are the career implications of learning the system. At first glance, it seems to me to be like a Java programmer going back to learning COBOL or FORTRAN. Thoughts?

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Kerry,

I worked on Tandem for several years for what feels like decades ago. I could say the same about IBM Mainframe, and I find myself back on it now - it took a few days for the archived braincells to reactivate and it's like I'm back to 1970.

The platforms might be old, but they're still kicking. In my case, our WebFOCUS client is on a Windows server and the reporting server is on the IBM mainframe. Reporting is done through MRE, but data loading is done via mainframe batch jobs. It's not a lot of fun, but somebody has to do it.

My issue is, I'm here as an ETL Developer/BI speicialist and I'm slogging through writing Tandem(shell-like) scripts, compiling and editing C code, etc. Am I that off-base to think my talents are being squandered here? I dont see how this knowledge can be put to good use.

Francis, how prevalent would you say Tandem and other mainframes are for DW?

T., I'm not sure about Tandem, but IBM Mainframe (z/OS) is very prevalent. I'm only writing JCL and WebFOCUS code - no compiling, no C, but I'd find this kind of stuff very stifling and boring.

Good, so I'm not way off base then. I just needed a level set because I haven't had just a ton of work exp in the DW world, but I've had a fair bit. I never thought the role of an ETL developer was to compile, test, and debug code or to run and monitor batch cycles.