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

People still get these kind of decimal data errors.

Now, what that article doesn't mention is that some of the newer data
types are hard enforced, even with DDS. For example, dates. I mean
"real" dates, times and timestamps. Not numeric or character
representations of dates. You cannot use CPYF to force bad data into
those.

There's a legitimate business reason for this. You may have an ERP
package. You may be reluctant to modify the properties of any of their
fields or add a column to any of their tables. However they have this
numeric column called something like Zimbabwe Currency Conversion or some
such thing. And you don't do business with Zimbabwe. And you 'really'
need to store a character field in their tables so you use a data
structure in RPG to overlay this column with your character field. You
cannot do this with the newer column types like dates. And you cannot do
this with a table defined with DDL like you can with a table defined with
DDS.




Rob Berendt