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The best advice anyone can give you is something you do not want to hear but ... Bite the bullet and fix the problem, you will be way far ahead of the game if you take this time to plan the conversion the right way and do not resort to tricking out the programs.
Not knowing your database situation, this may or may not apply however, define your new table with enough wiggle room for growth, but not so much wiggle room to be wasteful. For the client number field, you might think about using a two part primary key (if DB2 or the standard AS400 database). Once you define the table, you could write a quick and dirty program to populate the file, and take your time recompiling and testing the programs that access it (assuming that your back is not currently against the wall).
Old
Client-Number 7,0 Primary Key
New
Client-Prefix Primary Key 1
Client-Suffix 7,0 Primary Key 2
If you pick something useful for primary key 1 (like first three characters of last name or the state abbreviation) you may be able to derive other benefits from the work. This is my way of saying you may already have a high order qualifier defined and all that is needed is to re-key the table. <Yes I know this is a trick, but not all of the folks have terabytes available>
-----Original Message-----
From: GRIFFITHS, Clive [mailto:GRIFFIC@aisl.uk.com]
Sent: Friday, May 26, 2000 04:36 AM
To: MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com
Subject:
some time this year we will need to do some work to extend the range of our
client numbers available.
The current field is defined as 7,0 S (zoned decimal). Do you know of a way
to use hex/alpha characters so that we don't need to make any database
changes?
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