DSXchange

You are "going wrong" by omitting the trailing semi-colon. But that query will not give you the information needed to answer your question in a very targeted sense - it will find every DataStage job object (job, container, stage, link or annotation) that includes the text "JobName".

When you specify -lvmdsapi.so the compiler/linker needs to know where to find vmdsapi.so. This is usually achieved by its parent directory being mentioned in your shared libaray search path, an environment variable called LD_LIBRARY_PATH, SHLIB_PATH or LIBPATH, depending on which "flavour" of UNIX y...

No. You could design that in a job sequence, but there's no such setting.

Then you need to ask (your SAP experts) whether there are any known issues with the remote function call mechanism in SAP, in particular any that cause a segmentation violation.

There is a setting in the .odbc.ini file where you can enable tracing. From memory the option is called Trace, and there are two associated options, one of which is the pathname of the trace file.

Check that the parent directory of vmdsapi.so is in your shared library search path.

When do the hangs occur (for example metadata import, data browsing, job running)? Enable ODBC tracing and find out how far things are getting.

What you really need to do is to address the reasons why the underlying jobs exhibit this intermittent behaviour. A job sequence can not complete until all of the activities in it have completed (or a Terminator activity is executed), therefore if the underlying activity is hanging, or simply taking...

Sounds like you have not specified the field widths accurately.

AMERICAN won't know about the pound sterling symbol. You need to find the appropriate setting, probably one of the ISO8859 ones, that does know about this character.

Are you using Sequential File stage or Complex Flat File stage?

Your mention of packed and sign position properties suggests the latter.

One easy way would be to write to a fixed-width format sequential file.

Another way would be to specify Char as the data type of the two columns, and change the DataStage pad character from 0x00 to space.

Are your data (your input links) correctly partitioned on the join key fields?

White space is illegal in packed decimal and there is therefore no way to force DataStage to accept the same. You can read the field as a string, and then parse the result.