Decimal[4,2] is a 3-byte packed decimal. I would expect that you should get an error if you try to read strings like "1024" and "10" as if they were packed decimal. I think you will need to read them in as strings and then convert them to decimal.
Decimal(4,2) ment total length is 4 and out of it, precision is 2. And hence the mantissa is also 2 here. If it is fixed width 4 consicutive digit can be read as 4,2.
In case of delimited input, 10 will be considired as 10.00.
Impossible doesn't mean 'it is not possible' actually means... 'NOBODY HAS DONE IT SO FAR'
It is always safest to treat text files as if they contain text as the only data type. Within the DataStage job you can then apply data type conversion functions using a Modify stage or a Transformer stage. The obvious exception is when you know that there are binary data in the "text" file.
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