RE: export direct from AS400 to PC w/o CA

Yes, FTP will handle any and all data types if you transfer in BINARY mode.


The real question is "Can the PC application handle EBCDIC Binary and Packed
fields."  The typical answer is No.  It is a trivial matter to create a work
file on the 400 that has all zoned fields, then CPYF the production data to
the work file.  A "proto data warehouse" if you will.  

This solution has the added benefit of allowing your 400 to control access
to the data via native security.  You can revoke access to the production
file except through adopted authority and give free access to the work file.
This behaves much more like legacy system security, and is a reasonable
transition into the world of distributed data.  

Also, many legacy systems have data in files that is not current until a
series of batch processes update it.  In these scenarios, it is very
possible for the PC user to download the data at the wrong time.  With the
work file approach, the data are more accurate because the batch update
process makes a copy of the final results.

Finally, FTP comes free with every copy of Windows 95/98/NT, doesn't muck
with the registry, doesn't take up any additional hard drive space, runs
very quickly and is a multi-platform industry standard.  I have no CA or 3rd
party software on my NT PC at home; I use Mochasoft for TN5250 and FTP for
data transfer.  A very low-impact, high return combination, IMO.

Buck Calabro
Billing Concepts Albany, NY
mailto:mcalabro@commsoft.net

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jerome Draper 
> Sent: Monday, July 26, 1999 5:36 PM
> To:   MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com
> Subject:      RE: export direct from AS400 to PC w/o CA
> 
> 
> Will FTP handle binary, zoned, and packed decimal?
> 
> Jerry
> 
> At 12:58 PM 7/26/99 -0700, you wrote:
> >If you have TCP up and running, you can FTP to your PC if a FTP server is
> >running or you can FTP from your AS400 if it's FTP server is running.  I
> >generally extract the records and fields from the data bases to a work
> file
> >in qtemp and FTP to a FTP PC based server.  That way all the processing
> is
> >controlled from the AS400.  This will give you a fixed length text file
> on
> >your PC file server.
> 
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