RE: "DTS" Packages on the AS/400? (Brian Piotrowski)

Wow, thanks for the great answer, Dave (and everyone else who responded
as well).

Yes, DTS (data transformation services) was the topic I was discussing.
However, if there is a way to get high-fidelity sound from our AS/400,
I'd be interested to hear about it. :)

Brian.

-----Original Message-----
From: Dave Odom [mailto:Dave.Odom@xxxxxxxxxxxx] 
Sent: Monday, November 28, 2005 12:57 PM
To: midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: "DTS" Packages on the AS/400? (Brian Piotrowski)

Brian,

First... What's a DTS (alphabet soup)?   Is it Digital Theater System,
the Dallas Theological Seminary, the Defense Travel System or what?   
Having poked a little fun, I ASSUME (and we all know what that means),
you mean that Mickysoft thing used for moving data, etc.   I think what
you are looking for, in the parlance of the midrange (iSeries, various
flavors of UNIX) and mainframe world, is a tool or function to perform
ETL (Extract, Transformation & Load).   

IF I'm correct, I can tell you there is no native utility or function
or feature, etc., on the iSeries of which I'm aware, that will probably
do what you want.   Typical of the midrange and mainframe environments,
native OS or DB2 utilities like what you want are usually left up to
third-party vendors although there are exceptions.   Or, as often
happens at some shops, especially in large UNIX-flavor or mainframe
shops, they find that vendors utilities are not robust enough for large
amounts of data or to translate the data like they need and therefore
they create their own.   The latter was the case in one of my previous
lives where my people built multi-terabyte data warehouses and found
vendor's tools to move data like molasses in January at the North Pole
plus the problem of Transformation flexibility.

So, you are left with a build vs. buy situation.  And, of course, that
depending on your company's purse and/or your abilities to create ETL
utilities in the time frame allowed. 

If you plan to build one for yourself, you have all the options you
could imagine.   You have the normal High Level Languages ( C, COBOL,
Pascal, RPG, etc.) or one of my favorite utility languages call REXX.  
You'll probably want to incorporate large amounts of the SQL language
and let the DB2/400 engine do much of your logic and other work for you.
  I know if I can use SQL instead of coding in a language, I will.  

As you probably know, using SQL just makes good sense as it is often
fast to build and a more efficient way of accessing data.  Plus it is
the direction IBM is trying to get the AS/400/iSeries world to go, and,
of course, it is the way the rest of the Relational Data Base world
functions. Therefore being proficient with SQL is better for your skill
set and resume.  Of course, combine the best of both worlds where
necessary.  

I'm sure there are numerous vendors that will contact you and you
should "kick their tires" to see if what they have can help but remember
there are several folk out here that are willing to help if you wish to
"roll your own".

Take care,

Dave
Arizona