Which mainframe architecture are you on? IBM iSeries / AS/400 mainframes can provide socket services. These return data as CSV. CSV in turn can be queried with

Which mainframe architecture are you on? IBM iSeries / AS/400 mainframes can provide socket services. These return data as CSV. CSV in turn can be queried with tools such as http://pythonhosted.org/querycsv/ http://pythonhosted.org/querycsv/ I'm not sure if SQL really is the right approach here, though.