DSXchange

hi all,
How to know whether my source data is ASCII or EBDIC ..is there method for knowing the same, i am using IBM DB2 i series as source and moving into the p-series

Thanks in Advance
Boppana Ramakrishna

If it makes sense when you view it in DataStage without any transformation then it's ASCII.

Ray's answer applies most of the time.

I prefer to use external tools to DataStage to do this check, rather than the overhead of setting up a test in DataStage. First, I need to know something about the content of the data before you can determine if it is in EBCDIC of ASCII. ei. If you know the first few bytes are suppose to be displayable numeric values then you can use a hex viewer external to the DataStage product to check what byte values are present (od -x <file). If you see 0xF1 - 0xF9 for first few bytes, then it's EBCDIC (or an ASCII file with meaningless junk)

It's probably worth your while as an ETL programmer to read up what common datatypes in EBCDIC or ASCII look like in hex format.

- Greg