Downtime for EBCDIC to ASCII conversion

[Former Member]

Hello,

we have performed successfully an EBCDIC to ASCII conversion for a client's development system.

The total downtime was about 24 hours.

The customer though, refuses to have downtime of their production system, since it severely affects their systems.

Is there a possibility not to have any downtime for an EBCDIC to ASCII conversion ?

We were thinking as alternatives to build a second productive system, do the conversion there and after finishing, to apply journal receivers from the real production system. This would minimize their downtime to the backup time of the production system and the time needed to apply the journal receivers ?!?

Has anyone performed such a task ?

Would this be feasible (we would have to apply journals from an EBCDIC system to an ASCII system)

Thank you very much

Katerina Psalida

[christian_bartels · Accepted solution]

Hi Katerina,

applying journal changes from the EBCDIC system to the ASCII system will not work for several reasons, primarily because the journal keeps track of the journaled tables through an internal journal ID, which will not be the same after the EBCDIC to ASCII conversion. Technically it would not work because the data in the journal entries is kept very low-level, so a conversion from EBCDIC to ASCII during apply is not implemented. Also, the journal entries are based on the relative record numbers in the table, and after the conversion, the relative record numbers will not necessarily be the same.

I am not aware of a zero-downtime conversion option. You can speed up the conversion if you use the "Inplace" conversion option. Did you use that when you measured the 24 hours downtime at the test system? If not, you should give the Inplace option a try. Depending on your data, it could reduce the downtime significantly.

Kind regards,

Christian Bartels.

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hello Christian,

Thanks for your answer.

We have not checked the in-place conversion because it is a valid method only for LATIN-1 systems. We are in a LATIN-7 environment, so we went for the export / import.

Your information regarding journal receivers was very helpful to explain to the customer. Thank you very much for your time.

Katerina

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Katerina,

depending on the effort, the customer is ok with to spent on this project, it might be an idea to look into IMIG - (incremental migration) - even when this is not supported on 4.6 for System i as I do have in mind. This is a "consulting project" anyway and in theory it should work in 4.6 as well - so I would see a chance to make this happen.

This would strongly reduce the downtime and increase the project costs a lot ...

Regards

Volker Gueldenpfennig, consolut international ag

http://www.consolut.com http://www.4soi.de http://www.easymarketplace.de

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hello Volker,

thanks for the answer. I will talk about the alternative to the customer, although I am not very optimistic....

BR

Katerina