Dear Micael and all Thank you very much for your response and the valuable information provided. Over the past few days, I discussed the DBD definitions with our IMS DBA, and we have a similar setup
where “The only fields that are required to be defined in a DBD are the keys, indexed fields, and any other fields that the application wants to be able to reference in Segment Search Arguments (SSAs). In the IMS system I work on, 99% of the segment fields are not defined in the DBD.” We are considering moving away from the mainframe, and our historical data is preserved on tape in IMS unload format and IMS IC. Initially, we wanted to convert the IMS database to a DB2 and then into a MySQL database to facilitate the migration of backup data from the mainframe to linux. Now, we are only planning to transcode the IMS unload files to make them readable on the Linux platform. We have all the necessary copybooks and are currently looking to convert these IMS unload files from EBCDIC to UTF-8 encoding. Here are a few questions regarding the conversion process: 1.For fields in the copybook defined as PIC A, PIC X, and PIC 9, these require conversion, but for numeric fields like PIC 9(4) COMP-1, no conversion is needed, correct? 2 How do we handle the conversion if the database has multiple copybooks? 3 What is the process for converting variable-length fields? 4 If we choose not to convert anything, are there any tools available on Linux that can read these IMS unload files in EBCDIC encoding? 5.Does the IMS unload file include information about segments, and how are they encoded? Furthermore, we do not have access to Broadcom IMS tools or File Manager. Could you please inform me if IBM has any utilities that can create the unload format file from an image copy input? Any advice or suggestions you can provide would be greatly appreciated. Best regards， ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
