Get rid of COBOL levels in datastage Data Set column defs?

[ray.wurlod]

Welcome aboard. What you say is true, but unnecessary.

Consider a record with seven fields, each of which has four characters.
AAAABBBBCCCCDDDDEEEEFFFFGGGG

And let's call them FieldA, FieldB, ..., FieldG

Now it doesn't matter what level any of these fields is at (provided it's not level 01, which is the record itself), they will always be stored as shown above.

So it will suffice that the metadata represents them as seven Char(4) fields.