On 2/23/2011 1:36 AM, Tsai Laurence wrote:
Dears ,
as the subject ,would like to plan the MF unicode migrtion.
1) What are major considerations you will raise ?
- UTF 8 , UTF 16 , or UTF 32 support on MF ?
- COBOL pgm migration ? support UTF16 only ?
- PL/I PGM migration ?
- DB (IMS DB / VSAM DB /DB2 DB ) migration?
- data exchange migration ? MQ / FTP / ..etc
- does DFSORT support UTFx sorting ?
- PSF printing ,how to have the user report display correctly as
migration to UTF16?
2) Any shop done MF UNICODE migration before ?
Appreciated your kindly thoughts ...
Regards,
Laurence
I'm not clear on what you mean by MF unicode migration.
Do you plan to migrate all your data to Unicode code pages?
If so, how is your data currently stored?
Here are some observations ...
zArchitecture supports UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32 in the hardware
- that is, there are machine instructions for
converting between all three encodings
- but there are currently more hardware instructions
that work with UTF-16 data than with UTF-8 or UTF-32,
depending on what operations you will be doing
z/OS supports all three encodings, but UTF-32 seems to
have the least support; this may change, but you need
to deal with how things are today.
COBOL supports UTF-16 best, but can work with UTF-8 to
some degree. See our two day course "Enterprise COBOL
Unicode and XML Support", details at:
http://www.trainersfriend.com/COBOL_Courses/d705descr.htm
The latest Enterprise PL/I compiler (V4R1) supports
UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32. We would construct a PL/I
course along the lines of the COBOL Unicode course
if there were any demand.
DFSORT deals with Unicode using locales, but there are
restrictions on what facilities support locales, and
I'm not sure if the Unicode locales are supplied or if
you would have to create your own. (Left as an exercise
to the student. :-) )
DB2 is more complex. Of course, the DB2 catalog is
encoded in UTF-8. After that the details are more
complicated. I assume you know of this site:
http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg27019288
which lets you choose the version of DB2 you are
working with; then look specifically at the Installation
Guide and the Internationalization Guide.
VSAM does not recognize Unicode as far as I can tell;
but maybe that's OK, unless you need Unicode values
for keys; but you can probably just use the binary
value: specify a starting location and length as
always; the value can be Unicode or anything else,
really.
I have no clue about IMS or PSF printing.
Still, there are vast areas where you won't be able
to use Unicode: program names, data set names,
member names, JCL; not sure about ISPF support,
although I know there's some codepage support in
ISPF. TSO. Not sure about z/OS UNIX file names.
This is an enormous task, it would seem, but if
you define your parameters and boundaries carefully
and have plenty of time, it should be do-able.
We would be happy to participate in such a process,
in terms of research, testing, development, and
training. I imagine there are others on this list
who would also be interested.
--
Kind regards,
-Steve Comstock
The Trainer's Friend, Inc.
303-393-8716
http://www.trainersfriend.com
* To get a good Return on your Investment, first make an investment!
+ Training your people is an excellent investment
* Try our new tool for calculating your Return On Investment
for training dollars at
http://www.trainersfriend.com/ROI/roi.html
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