AS400 DB2 and IBM Integration Bus

[Pasqualino Imbemba]

Hi everyone,

I have a DB2 on an AS400 system. The DB2 is structured via DDS paradigm.
I need to connect to its data: I know I can use SQL via JDBC/JTOpen, but
some of the tables are seralized in binary format.

I was wondering if using the IBM Integration Bus (ESB) would be helpful
in getting the desired CRUD access to those tables via REST or SOAP. I
know this kind of transformation is natural of Enterprise Service Buses,
but I'm concerned about the serialized tables (contained in a
non-serialized one): Will deserialization come out of the box or is it
necessary to apply some transformation logic?

Thanks
#pasquale

[jon.f...@gmail.com]

What you are saying frankly makes no sense. Perhaps if you posted the DDS definition of the table we could offer suggestions. Alsop be nice to know what platform you are trying to access the data from.

But simply put - any "file" on the IBM i (there hasn't been an AS/400 for about 20 years) is a table and can be accessed via SQL. There is within the capabilities of DDS nothing that I can think of that would equate to a "serialized table" which is why we need to see what you are talking about and also to know what you are trying to extract.

Your task should be simple ...

[Pasqualino Imbemba]

Am 16.10.20 um 17:08 schrieb jon.f...@gmail.com:

>> #pasquale
> What you are saying frankly makes no sense. Perhaps if you posted the DDS definition of the table we could offer suggestions. Alsop be nice to know what platform you are trying to access the data from.

This is the DDL of the table KL11. KL11FLD is the column that contains
those other tables I need access to.

Create Table KL11 (
KL11SER CHAR(3)
,KL11TAB CHAR(8)
,KL11ELE CHAR(8)
,KL11ELS CHAR(4)
,KL11PRG NUMERIC(2)
,KL11DDS CHAR(8)
,KL11FLD VARCHAR(3807)
);

I do not know what kind of encoding it uses and which IBM i procedure is
used to get those other tables stored. My question: Depending on this
(IBM i) procedure, would an integration via IBM ESB automate
encoding/decoding if I integrate via REST instead and leave
serialization to the ESB?

>
> But simply put - any "file" on the IBM i (there hasn't been an AS/400 for about 20 years) is a table and can be accessed via SQL. There is within the capabilities of DDS nothing that I can think of that would equate to a "serialized table" which is why we need to see what you are talking about and also to know what you are trying to extract.
>
> Your task should be simple ...
>

Yes, I know and accessed via JDBC to a DDS organized DB2 earlier. It's
the first time I encounter such a serialization pattern. I was told this
yields from the 80ies, where DBMS was limited in I/O access.

Thanks
#pasquale

[jon.f...@gmail.com]

I sent this yesterday but it apparently didn't make it for some reason.

Interesting.

You need to look at the code that currently progresses the data.

To my knowledge, which goes back to the 80s and before, there was never any "native" support for any such thing. In fact VarChar is (in those terms) a relatively new option that was not available in the 80s on the IBM i or its predecessors.

So that leaves us with a number of possibilities. My best guess is that this may have originated on a mainframe and be a varchar representation of a varying length record. Ah! Is this a COBOL shop? If so that would explain it as this is how variable length records were implemented for COBOL. A number of fixed length columns followed by one huge varchar that contains a variable repeating number of a single column or structure.

Either way you will need to have the original layout of the data which can only be obtained from program source unless you know roughly what is supposed to be in there and can work it out from the content.

If you can get the code I will gladly help you make sense of it.