Fw: AS/400 connectivity question

I received the following e-mail from a friend. I had already responded,
but was curious about any insights that others on the list might have.
Topics
like these have come up in the past and it seems like there is always
more than one way to solve it.

> Hi Joe;
>
 >I'm on a mission and I'm having trouble finding anyone with experience
>in this area.
>
 >Recently I received a flyer from someone offering training on Microsoft
desktop
>software interacting with DB2/400. For years I have felt that users who
could
>access DB2/400 data with Excel would be easier to satisfy than users who
are
>asked to use a foreign report writer. I want to be able to do what Chad is
doing
>with VB on SQL databases, pulling data right out of DB2/400 into a
spreadsheet.
>I figured if someone is teaching this concept IBM must have something
behind the
>scenes that people don't know about.
>
 >I found IBM's Redbook SG24-4249-01, DB2/400 Advanced Database Functions,
and
>read it. After reading the Redbook I came to the conclusion that it should
be
>possible to write macros in VB script and SQL statements for Excel to pull
data
>from DB2/400 databases using the DRDA architecture. However; past
experience has
>been that a gap often exists between what IBM says can be done and reality.
>Sometimes IBM's solutions are to painful or slow to be practical.
>
>At that point I tried to figure out who might be using Excel as a report
writer
>in real life. First I asked Chad, who is good with Microsoft's products.
Chad
>said I might be able to do it with Client Access but to make it work well I
>should have SNA Server. Chad might be right but because he is trained only
on
>Microsoft and not DB2/400 and the DRDA support that is present is recent
>releases and because he suggested SNA Server I wanted another opinion.
>
> That's where I'm at today Joe. Hope the above makes sense to you.

BTW, since I have used Access for this type of thing in the past and not
Excel,
I would recommend Access. Thanks for any insights here.

Joe Teff

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