Pandora's Box - Using DS NLS

ArndW · Post by **ArndW** » Mon Feb 21, 2005 5:09 am

I know that it used to be well-nigh to impossible to revert from a NLS installation to a non-NLS one. I wanted to ask if this has changed with the newer releases? Has anyone written a program that might take a .DSX or .XML export and remove NLS-information?

ray.wurlod · Post by **ray.wurlod** » Mon Feb 21, 2005 2:58 pm

What happens when you try to import into a non-NLS DataStage a file exported from an NLS-enabled installation? Can you fiddle with the CharacterSet property in the file header?

ArndW · Post by **ArndW** » Tue Feb 22, 2005 2:52 am

Ray,

I remember back when DS was young(er) the export contained so many NLS-related attributes that whenever we tried to "fiddle" with the files and import them into non-nls accounts the import would either fail or the jobs were unusable. I was wondering if the NLS-enabling of a DataStage account was still akin to the mathematical trapdoor algorithm or Pandora's box .... once you start you can never go back...

roy · Post by **roy** » Thu Feb 24, 2005 5:41 am

Sad to say I only worked with NLS enabled.

battaliou · Post by **battaliou** » Thu Feb 24, 2005 10:41 am

I edited my uvconfig file (NLSMODE 0) to disable NLS in my current environment. I had to do a uvregen as well, but everything reverted ok.

ArndW · Post by **ArndW** » Thu Feb 24, 2005 10:59 am

battaliou wrote:I edited my uvconfig file (NLSMODE 0) to disable NLS in my current environment. I had to do a uvregen as well, but everything reverted ok.

Were you working a UNIX environment and was it Server or Px? If it is that easy it would take a great load off my mind with our impeding conversion to NLS.

Thanks for the info,

ray.wurlod · Post by **ray.wurlod** » Thu Feb 24, 2005 3:52 pm

The reason that this works is that UV-UTF8 encodes Unicode code points in such a fashion that any single-byte characters (for example ASCII) are still stored as single-byte characters, except for those that use the same code points as dynamic array delimiters (248 through 255).

battaliou · Post by **battaliou** » Fri Feb 25, 2005 5:15 am

Hello Arnd

Converting to NLS was very easy. The knock on effect only seemed to affect dates. For example a standard date in non nls looks something like 2005/02/25 whereas in NLS its 2005 02 25.

Code: Select all

OCONV(DATE(),'DYMD[4,2,2]')

This issue affected some of our function calls.

Regards
Martin Battaliou

ArndW · Post by **ArndW** » Fri Feb 25, 2005 6:12 am

Battaliou,

I realize that the conventions will change depending on the locale you are in; but I am worried about how DS will input & output the varied character sets - Big5, Shift-JIS, etc. It also seems that Px deals with these conversions quite differently than Server does; so I've decided to leave the proverbial box closed and just state categorically that there is no way back from NLS. It might not be the complete truth but it will suffice.

Btw, why did you end up reverting?

Thanks for the input!