HI Guys,

I am newbie to DB2 and rather comfortable with Informix and Oracle. Actually i have a client who has already migrated all its apps from system i to AIX and Linux. Only the DB2 Database is running on system i. Can someone tell me about the implication/challenges in migrating the DB2 from system i to AIX for example....

Thanks in advance.

from db2 view, you can migrate the db to aix, if you have the ddl
maybe db2look will work for collecting this from I/series (I have never tried)
from aix make connection and export/import all data after ddl executed

I am told that the DB2 binaries for system i is a special version since the system i OS is itself an object based OS. to make it clear, i am told that a dedicated development team worked on DB2 for system i and another team for the rest of the Operating systems....How far this saying is true? And any experience/benchmarks regarding performance of DB2 on system i and the same DB2 on other OS.

Thanks in advance

I'd say that, apart from the name and the fact that their SQL dialects are very close, these are two completely different products.

Having moved data from from z/OS to DB2 on Linux, I can speak from some experience. Both z/OS and iSeries are EBCDIC and AIX is ASCII. The best way to do this is to set up a DB2 connection from a Windows or AIX box to the "host" database on iSeries. This will require that you set up a Type 2 connection with the following statements:

- catalog tcpip node
- catalog dcs database (this is an extra step required to connect to z/OS or iSeries host)
- catalog database

Then using the db2 command line in AIX, do a regular export of the tables:

db2 "export to employee.ixf of ixf select * from employee"

Then load or import the data onto DB2 for AIX using the export file created.

See if you can find someone in the company who has set up a type 2 connection from Windows to the iSeries database, and this will help you with doing the connection. Note that you will need a license for DB2 Connect to do this, but if you have DB2 ESE Version 8 (and I think V9, but not V9.5) it comes with a free license for DB2 Connect that allows you to connect to a iSeries or z/OS database.

You could do the export on Windows DB2 Command Line and then transfer it to AIX when you are done for the DB2 load/import.

When you've got the system configured as you descibe, you can do a "load from cursor" and skip the ixf interface.

Can you automatically create the table definition with load from cursor like you can with a REPLACE_CREATE ? I have never bothered to try it.

I would say that in most cases the benefit of being able to do a load from cursor is minimal, and I would prefer to have a static copy of the IXF file that I could load again if needed without going back to the host.