DSXchange

Since you mentioned needing a "refresher" on the packed decimal format, the following is intended to be simple. I've been dealing with it for many years, and I sometimes benefit from a reminder of the basics. I intend no disrespect for your technical skills. Packed decimal is a storage for...

From my POV, I would very much rather it be "one long string" for a simple reason: People will insert control characters where they don't belong. I recently had to deal with a line feed break in a message field because the person creating it (test file feed) didn't like the way it looked.

I have a single data source and must create two output files, both needing a header and trailer. I do it all in one job with no intermediate files. For each output file job stream, I split the data to the three record types (I must use the original input to set some of the columns in the header and ...

If the phrase "subtract months" is in a set pattern against the "yyyymm" format shown, then a fraction-of-12 calculation becomes easy to do. The year is the integer portion, and your mm value is divided by 12 to convert it to decimal. Convert the number of months to be subtracted...

You're most welcome, Gazelle. I'm an old DOS dog from the bad (ahem, I say good) old days of character-based "graphics" and 8-bit limitations. Windows and WYSIWYG has made us lazy, and this is not the first time I've encountered this sort of problem. My only claim to "brilliant" ...

I have found in 7x that a generated report from Designer will fail to produce the bmp if the path for the location of the two files is too long. I don't know if that is relevant to your problem, but I'd like to see further discussion of the details. Thanks for making your post.

Our approach here is to import executibles only using a script (we are in Unix) that runs: dsjob -import -OVERWRITE I've left out many environmental things because they are specific to our shop. We use Control-M and a "utility" id that owns the job and the command when it runs. Only the pr...

The phrase "mainframe to DB2" leaves me a bit confused. Is this sequential files to IBM DB2 v9? Are they ISAM or VSAM files? And the biggest question of all, for me: What is your maintenance interface for DB2? Is it BMC, or something else? Nothing beats the bulk unload/load utilities for p...

To keep it simple, I coded my similar situation DecimalToString to a VarChar stage variable, then used Trim(stage-variable) to the output column. Check the field properties of your pic 9(08)v9(2) input column. Make sure it's defined as decimal (10,2) with display length of 10, and that your stage va...

Thanks, Ray. I do intend to pay for Premium, but my Procrastinator's Guild rules keep getting in the way...

dsjob -jobinfo output includes a field called "controller". This is typically the parent sequence from which the job was invoked. Therefore, when your Ctrl-M script uses dsjob to retrieve inf ... Ray, I keep meaning to pay my Premium fee, but haven't done so yet. A lack of further respons...

I've been looking for good ways to avoid needing to log on to Director for fatal error messages. Ray D.'s recent post about Director Lite is a step up from my current situation, but not likely to be used any time soon. Before I describe the details, I also need to point out that we do not put design...

I assumed no problem with low-values because they are ASCII null.

I also wonder, from his replies so far, if his clients are tying his hands and expecting him to do handstands.

There is an open question here: How is the text file from the mainframe being created? If there is a separate download job/process that creates the file, then the easiest and most effective way to handle this is to make sure that process is doing the proper EBCDIC to ASCII conversions. It's possible...

My limitation is that the people who see job statuses are not trained in DataStage, let alone given logon authority to Director in production. Without going into the details, on balance I agree with that even after spending three years on a one-week-of-four support rotation, with jobs running at all...