With NOMAD 2008, we are excited to bring you several new facilities including:

• Reporting access to Oracle and SQL Server: With this release, a NOMAD server will provide access from z/OS to Oracle and SQL Server data residing on mid-tier UNIX, Windows or Linux servers. NOMAD users will be able to report from Oracle or SQL Server data in just the same way that they currently report from mainframe data sources. Because all reports are handled by the same mainframe server, they will also be able to join Oracle or SQL Server data with their mainframe data from DB2, VSAM, IMS, IDMS and Teradata for more comprehensive reporting.

• A facility for the creation of stationery for a PDF document. This will allow graphic images to be placed at 9 locations on a page within the document. As stationery, these images will then appear on every page in the same location of the document. This allows company logo files, "confidential only" watermarks, and other images to be included in a PDF output file for report customization.

• Significant enhancements to the COPYBOOK utility, which is used to generate 4GL schemas from COBOL COPYBOOKs. The generation of 15-character 4GL names from longer COBOL names has been improved to make it more likely to generate meaningful 4GL names. Related to this, there are new, powerful options that allow you to remove or abbreviate strings commonly used in your COBOL names. Other enhancements include a new easy-to-use form to specify key items, ensuring you don’t forget to do this performance-critical task, and the ability to edit the configuration file and generated schema within the COPYBOOK utility for greater ease of use.

• Support for concatenated VSAM data sets , so that they can be accessed for reporting as one large database/data set.

• A new facility that will assist z/OS sites in the management of sortwork space. You can use the new OPTION SORTTEMPALLOC command to specify the size and placement of temporary sortwork data sets.

This release contains an integrated set of all fixes available for version 7.50. The fixes have not only been tested individually, but the entire package has been independently installed and re-tested. This update ensures that customers have all available fixes, that the resulting version is reliable, and that they won’t need to install individual patches.