Does anyone have any experience writing COBOL programs that use
subprograms.  The problem I have is that our univeristy bought a
degree audit program that was originally written for an IBM mainframe
that has the main driver program and 101 subprograms that are called
from the main driver.  About 10 of these subprograms have needed to
be modified to access our image databases holding our student information
and degree audit information.  With the size of this program, I am
looking at anyway to possible speed processing up.
 
One of the ideas I have had was to open the database once in the called
subprogram using a non dynamic subprogram and not close it so that when
I go back into the subprogram and process the next student the database
is already open.  I can set it up so the program only opens the database
the first time, but the second time it goes into the subprogram it does
not find the appropriate records, but it does not tell me the database is
closed (or any other error messages).  If I open and close the database
each time everything works great, except for it being slow. What I mean
by being slow is processing 200 to 250 + students in an hour.  The
compiled program is probably about 150,000 lines of code.
 
If anyone has any ideas on how I could speed up the performance, or If it
is even possible to open the database once in the subprogram and keep it
open for future processing your help would be greatly appreciated.
 
Thanks,