DSXchange

It's normal (optimized) and it's standard across most databases - you do not control the order in which the database server decides to store columns. Most, in my experience, try to put the fixed-length ones first and the variable-length ones later. In rare cases this can be tunable.

Search DSXchange for the SETFILE command.

No. The DB2 API is very similar in construction to the ODBC API - with some minor variants (for example ENV rather than HENV for the name of the environment handle). However, it's still probably an inability to load a driver of some kind.

In Administrator, have you got a separate user defined for running scheduled jobs (on the Schedule tab)? If so, login as that user and do the AT listing.

This can be a failure to load the ODBC driver or - on Windows - the ODBC driver manager.

Use a server job with a Folder stage.

Hard coding a link for every col1 value possibility is one way. The links that don't process any rows will still create files - you can clean these up with an after-job subroutine.

Welcome aboard. If you import the "table definition" from a relevant COBOL copybook, then all of the required metadata will be there for you. As a general rule field sizes are fixed in mainframe data, so there is no field delimiter and no need for quotes. The record delimiter will depend u...

I do (understand the fear) but disagree totally with it.

The main issue, it seems to me from my experience, is the concern about needing to maintain two skill sets.

Well you'd better show us precisely how you have configured/programmed these mechanisms (SCD or transformer or surrogate key generator).

DB2 Connector does not use ODBC protocol.

{0} indicates a zero byte - that is, 0x00. Maybe you can pre-process your XML stream to remove these.

Only the obvious one - unschedule the job in Director then re-schedule.

Are you sure it doesn't show up in an AT listing? What if you are a member of the Administrators group when doing the AT listing?

There's a table of date format tags (including "%eeee") in Chapter 2 of the Parallel Job Developer's Guide

It may be elsewhere in the version 7.5 manual, but I'd be pretty confident it's in there somewhere.