Hello,

We've got a DB2 v8.x on OS/390 in our organization. It's in another department and they charge us for access. We currently have a script that syncs some tables to a local MS SQL2008 instance. However, we'd like to explore the feasibility of either doing some sort of one-way log shipping or nightly DB "restores" to our side either on a full DB basis or per table basis, if possible.

The data on our side is 100% read-only and only used for various warehouse apps, so there is never a need to write data back to the OS/390 and no worry about overwriting data on our side.

In a perfect world we'd like to get an hourly or every 2 or 3 hour "sync" going on (log shipping or other??), but would be able to settle for a nightly process or relatively up to the minute would work as well.

On our side we could either do Linux or Windows, but I'm looking for a higher level view of "is this even possible" and just some of the keywords that I need to start researching. We've got minimal DB2 server admin experience, but plenty of MySQL, Postgre and MS SQL experience in our section.

So, a pointer in the right direction would be awesome!

Thanks!

Backup/restore and log shipping is definitely not possible across platforms. You could set up SQL replication which would be as real-time as you like. As a simpler alternative you could also export the tables you need to text files, move the files over, and import (or load) them into the destination tables. The latter option won't give you as up-to-date currency of data; it will also introduce an issue of data set consistency as the source data may be changing while being exported.

If you can spend money, consider InfoSphere Change Data Capture.

Note that the mainframe guys may still be charging you for every CPU cycle you spend reading their system.