DSXchange

Can you connect to a Lotas Notes Database and extract data? If you can how?

The only way to connect to a Lotus Notes database is via the ODBC connectors in DataStage. There are several third party tools that expose (portions of) the Lotus system to ODBC, but I think that IBM's NotesSQL comes with the product and you can use that.

You can download IBM NotesSql here

From memory you have to have lotus notes installed on the datastage server as well. There was a problem with a certain version that a site I was working on was using. Version 4.X something. When to version 5 and there was no problems.

For the lotus notes database that I was connecting to I had to have a dummy user id created so that I could get read access to the database. The dummy user id was given read only permission to the database.
The dummy user id didn't have a password. (Can't remember the extact reason for that off the top of my head. Maybe to do with it prompting for a password.)

From "back in the day" when I had to deal with Lotus Notes as one of my sources, there is also a product called NotesPump that we used.

I only mention it for completeness as it doesn't allow you access to Notes data directly, but can be used to 'pump' or push Notes data elsewhere that you do have access to. For example, we used it to stage data into Oracle. DataStage would periodically pick it up and take it from there.

Thanks, I'll take a look into those options