CA Earl

CA Earl is a reporting language and system designed for mainframe environments, enabling organizations to generate reports from legacy data sources such as IMS, CA Datacom/DB, and VSAM. It provides a means to access and present information stored in these systems in a readable format. CA Earl includes a language for defining reports and a runtime environment for executing them.

The system is particularly useful for organizations that need to extract and present data from older systems without extensive programming. The architecture of CA Earl includes the reporting language itself, the runtime environment, and the data access components. The reporting language allows users to define the structure and content of reports.

The runtime environment executes the reports and retrieves data from the specified data sources. The data access components provide the interface to various data sources, including IMS, CA Datacom/DB, and VSAM. A key architectural feature is the ability to create custom file-access exits, allowing CA Earl to interact with various data sources.

Many Computer Associates (CA) products include pre-canned CA Earl reports, such as CA ACF2, CA Roscoe, CA TLMS, CA Jars, CA Jobtrac, and CA Scheduler, providing out-of-the-box reporting capabilities. CA Earl runs on z/OS, z/VM, and zVSE/VSEn platforms. Security is typically integrated with the security mechanisms of the underlying mainframe environment, such as RACF, ACF2, or Top Secret.