Re: Migration tools mainframe (IBM) to Midrange??

Peter Cumming wrote:
>
> Does anyone know of any tools that can run on a mainframe (IBM) and pull
> data (extract) for transfer to a midrange (Unix) box in an efficient
> fashion?? Currently we have to write custom programs on our mainframe to
> extract data we want to a flat file. Then for each extract we must
> unpack any packed data (Comp-3) fields on the mainframe.
> Then we transfer the data from the Mainfrmae to the midrange and BCP it
> in to the database. We could also do a hyperchannel.
>
> Wonder if there is some better or quicker way or some product...

Our netCONVERT product accepts complex formatted data records from the mainframe containing EBCDIC-encoded character data intermixed with numeric data in packed or other binary representations, and converts them for use on Unix or NT-based platforms. You can convert the data to it's identical ASCII format with embedded numeric fields suitable for use by COBOL or other applications running on the smaller platforms, or to a CSV (Comma Separated Values) format for importing into databases and other applications.

netCONVERT will handle complex files, including variable length records, and files containing more than one record type. If the file is produced by a COBOL program, then the COBOL FD is read by netCONVERT to understand the file layout. Otherwise the file must be described to netCONVERT manually. In some cases other file mappings can be easily translated into a COBOL FD acceptable to netCONVERT. We were able to do this quite easily for the AS400.

You can do these conversions in either direction, so that you can move data back and forth at will. netCONVERT is available for the mainframe (MVS or VM), and for NT and the most popular Unix variants. In some complex cases it is best to convert the data on the mainframe and then to transfer the converted data to the smaller platform. For example, when you FTP variable length records to an ASCII-based platform, the record length information is lost, precluding a succesful conversion on the smaller platform. Converting on the mainframe avoids this problem.

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