When the IBM unload utility is used to unload data from a table space, a punch card file is produced that describes the data in a second file which contains all the data for that table space. The punch card file contains data in this format:
LOAD DATA INDDN SYSREC LOG NO REPLACE EBCDIC CCSID(01027,05035,04396) INTO TABLE “username”.”table_name “ WHEN(00001:00002 = X’00A1’) ( “DATA1 “ POSITION( 00004:00258) CHAR MIXED(255) NULLIF(00003)=X’FF’ , “DATA2 “ POSITION( 00260:00516) VARCHAR MIXED NULLIF(00259)=X’FF’ , “DATA3 “ POSITION( 00518:00772) CHAR MIXED(255) NULLIF(00517)=X’FF’ )
The punch card file describes the rows and columns in the unloaded data file. The Replication Materialization process can use this information to reformat the unloaded data into log records and pass it to the Replication Extract as though it came from a DB2 log. In most cases, non-IBM utilities use this format. As long as the punch syntax and the unloaded data use the IBM format, then materialization will work with these utilities.
The only information about the table that cannot be found in the punch card file is the DBID (data base ID number) and the OBID (table ID number). These numbers are used by Replication Extract to find the LTMOBJECTS and system information for the table.
