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Not without seeing the job design and the routine code.

Yes, assuming that abc is a variable name. But only for those characters you have mentioned in the first argument of Convert().

If

Use substring or Left() to isolate the first character.
Test this against itself with the UpCase() function applied, or against an upper case alphabet using the Index() function.
Use If to generate an int8 result.

Unless you're getting NLS warnings, NLS is not the culprit. Does using a sparse lookup give the right results? If so you need to compile in trace mode, or insert a Peek stage, to see what's actually being loaded into the virtual Data Set when not in trace mode.

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This will almost certainly need to done using stage variables in a Transformer stage that has its input sorted (and partitioned) by the key columns. A Sort stage can generate a key change column, which may prove useful.

... or that one or more of the environment variables that need to be set to tell DataStage about the compiler/linker has not been given a correct value.

Is any of the key fields VarChar and, if so, might the values in the two data sets have been trimmed differently? That is, might one set of values have, say, trailing spaces and the other not have them?

Yes. Your support provider. That's one of the reasons you pay maintenance.

You are not designing server jobs, so cease using a server job mindset.

One possibility is that the importer stops scanning once ten characters have been processed if the data type has been declared as int32. OK, 11 characters, in case the first one is a sign.

You really do need to check your data.

To paraphrase an old joke, if I were going there I would not be starting from here. This is something you really need to have planned for in advance, and used a tool such as Parameter Manager. About all you can do now is export the entire project and search the export file.

Preserve these values in stage variabales. Constrain your output such that

Key expressions cannot be set on Key columns.Connected stage is used for lookup. When the connected stage is a Lookup File Set the key - and an index (hash table) - have already been defined. Therefore you are not permitted to redefine the key in the Lookup stage. You have to, on the stream input to...