OpenESQL provides customized support to ease the migration of a native Oracle Pro*COBOL application to the .NET environment. These customizations are provided via the PROCOB and DATE=EXTERNAL SQL compiler directive options, and a series of environment variables required if you choose to use the fully managed Oracle provider.
When using these directives, OpenESQL ensures that Oracle NLS settings (e.g., NLS_DATE_FORMAT) are set properly for the Oracle connection, and are shared by both your application and the Oracle server. For complete information on using PROCOB and DATE=EXTERNAL, see the PROCOB and DATE reference topics.
While Oracle Pro*COBOL and the unmanaged Oracle provider use NLS patterns for datetime data types and corresponding host variables, the fully managed provider only honors .NET patterns for output host variables. Therefore, if your application uses NLS patterns, and you want to enable it to use the Oracle fully managed provider, you must set one or more environment variables to convert the NLS patterns to .NET patterns at run time. See OpenESQL Date and Time Environment Variables for details.