Re: FTP of numeric data from MVS

From: Bill Manry - Oracle Corporation <bmanry_at_upsizeme.us.oracle.com>
Date: 1996/09/05
Message-ID: <50notj$hso_at_inet-nntp-gw-1.us.oracle.com>#1/1


Mark Johnson (mwc.mjohnson_at_capital.ge.com) wrote: [...]
>We download numeric data all the time from MVS and everything works
>great. Oracle supports packed and zone decimal in SQL*Loader. We
>just ftp the file down and that does the EBCDIC to ASCII conversion
>automatically. We have loaded gigs of data this way and there is no
>need to convert the data to display on the host and then run a C
>program on the other end to change it back.

Hmm...I doubt that you are letting ftp do the conversion since it has no way of distinguishing character data from packed decimal data. I suspect you are ftp-ing in binary and then using SQL*Loader's CHARACTERSET option to tell it that the character fields are (still) in EBCDIC. Loader will translate them to the target database character set.

Here is the problem with this approach: Loader assumes that number data is in a format native to the platform on which it (Loader) runs. It happens (in your case) that packed decimal is the same on your Oracle platform as on MVS. But that may not be the case with binary integers (if your Oracle system uses byte-reversed ints) and it definitely won't be the case with any floating-point numbers.

/b

--
Bill Manry  -  Mainframe and Integration Technologies  -  Oracle Corporation
These are my opinions, not necessarily Oracle's.
Received on Thu Sep 05 1996 - 00:00:00 CEST

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