DSXchange

Good point.

There is the column export stage which can combine multiple columns into a single column. You can pass through the key columns to keep them out of the concatenation.

The problem with most stage description fields is that most programmers don't read them, especially the well hidden transformer description box. It is a tab that programmers rarely click on. Annotations are more effective as they appear when the job is opened. It would be good to have description an...

This is typical of DataStage sites that have been going for a while and have had multiple project teams cycling through. Each team has a different way of doing things and you end up with a mix of server - parallel, restart - no restart, error reporting - no error reporting. I've seen sites go from t...

I don't think DataStage is the place to document business rules. Usually the DataStage developer wants the business rule already documented before they can code it. DataStage job documentation usually consists of job level descriptions and job annotations, neither of which can be easily linked to ta...

You might be able to do something in the SOA Edition of DataStage where jobs are "always on" and data can be passed from Job A to Job B where B will process it immediately. You cannot do this easily without SOA. A job has a hefty startup and shutdown overhead so you would be spending a few seconds p...

You can build your own customer metabrokers. For some reason Ascential charge an additional license for this (it should be part of the standard product) and I think it's called Meta Architect. You would dump your Excel metadata into a delimited file and build a custom metabroker that imports it into...

I've got DataStage 7.5.1 with the new lookup condition functionality. I want to add a lookup condition based on an input column, but when I bring up the right mouse menu in the condition field the "Input Column" option is greyed out, if I manually type the column name it is rejected. The manual show...

Any environment variables you set in Administrator can only be seen in the Administrator or by looking in the DSParams file in the project directory or by looking at the second Director log message for any job that shows all environment variables for that job. There is a FAQ on job specific environm...

In the Ascential World 2004 tech sessions on Enterprise Edition they advised people to steer clear of the transformer stage where the same thing could be done in a copy, modify or filter stage. I have found that if you can replace a transformer with a single alternative stage the job is about 25% fa...

Sorry Craig dude but parallel stages are the anal retentives of the datastage world. They do not like inventive use of links. You cannot have more then one link out of a database stage, just like you cannot write to and read from the same file stage (dataset, fileset). The kind of things used quite ...

We went with business rules and constraint filters written in transformers and directing messages to sequential files. These files were then collected and loaded into a couple custom message tables. From this we can peruse messages for failed or dirty rows and get metrics. We audit the data as it mo...

I agree with Ray, introduce a milestone point where data is staged, run the data to this milestone point and then decide if the load can be continued. We preprocess our data into load ready dataset files and then use simple database load jobs to get it in. Use job reporting and link counting to work...

If your company is a partner of Ascential software you can download Powerpoint packs from the partner web site on each of the data integration products.

If you look at the Parallel Job Developers Guide under the "Specification" entry you'll see there are three options, (DROP, KEEP, new_columnname). There is no specific ADD or COPY key word, your specification just names the new column and the column that is being copied. new_columnname [:new_type] =...