RE: Road Map to move a home grown application from RPG to DB2 SQL or to any other data base platform

I'll quote Mark Twain here, "There rumors of my death are greatly exaggerated."



-----Original Message-----
From: Nathan Andelin [mailto:nandelin@xxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Tuesday, January 17, 2017 1:48 PM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: Road Map to move a home grown application from RPG to DB2 SQL or to any other data base platform

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1. physical files and SQL tables. There minor architectonical differences.
Just try to copy invalid numeric data from a flat file into a DDS
described physical file with CPYF *NOCHK. All data is copied into the
DDS described physical file Now try to execute the same CPYF *NOCHK
with an SQL defined table. The CPYF fails and stops with the first
invalid data.
When writing into a DDS described file there is no check whether the
data is valid or not. The validation occurs as soon as the data is
read.
When writing into an SQL defined table data is checked an invalid data
is rejected. But there is no check anymore when reading from the SQL
described

Dan Cruikshank cited that example in the following article:

http://ibm.co/2j5Lgho

I found the example to be rather contrived because it expressly tries to force bad data into PFs, and it relies on the behavior of the CPYF utility.
That type of data corruption went away after people began using externally described files, as opposed to "flat files" and internal descriptions.

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