Extracting DB2 tables to flat files

[djbjr]

Ugh oh look out, Oracle guy in your forum. Please dont kick me out!

I have a question for you guys. I have an oracle data warehouse which uses PeopleSoft data on a DB2 mainframe environment.

Right now we recieve files from DB2 nightly using COBOL extract programs. This process is very tedious and has been troublesome.

Someone told me we could replace our COBOL extracts with a SAMPLE UNLOAD which will unload the tables into flat files which we can then FTP to our UNIX enviroment for me to SQLLOAD into my Data Warehouse. Has anyone here done that or heard of that?

Does anyone else have a solution of how I can get the table data from DB2 into flat files? I would like a feature that can set criteria so the files are incremental so that we can save on space. We transmit almost a terrabyte worth of data nightly.

Anyway, any help or suggestion would be greatly appreciated.

 

[gregsimpson]

There are a number of unload tools available forDB2, ranging from IBM tools to other vendors such as BMC UNLOAD.

To crack a similar problem at my shop we used BMC to UNLOAD the data, FTP’ed to the Warehouse and did an initial load of all data to the Warehouse.

From there on in we picked up all incremental changes from DB2 using DB2 Replication, often known as DPROPR. We unloaded the tables that DPROPR captures the changes into and sent them to the Warehouse for processing.

Initial load was circa 2 billion rows, incrementals being picked up are around 30,000 per day.

Cheers
Greg