Most platforms understand sequential data, even if it's just reading that data to load into a supported database on that platform. So, offloading your VSAM file (via IDCAMS REPRO since it's free), and ftp-ing it to the "other" platform should work fine, (so long as you aren't trying to send any binary data through a native EBCDIC/ASCII conversion without pre-processing the data). We do this all the time at many of the sites we maintain. It's not magic and as long as you know what the data is that you are sending (i.e. the aforementioned COMP data issue), yoiu should never have nay problems with using it on the "other" platform. (or vice-verse, you could send the data to the mainframe and upload it to a VSAM file if you want via IDCAMS).
You can encapsulate the VSAM data and send it to the "other" platform as well, but the other platform has to be able to read the VSAM data format, or it will just be gibberish. Brian ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
