DB2 10.5 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows

Moving data across platforms - file format considerations

Compatibility is important when exporting, importing, or loading data across platforms. The following sections describe PC/IXF and delimited ASCII (DEL) file format considerations when moving data between different operating systems.

PC/IXF file format

PC/IXF is the recommended file format for transferring data across platforms. PC/IXF files allow the load utility or the import utility to process (normally machine dependent) numeric data in a machine-independent fashion. For example, numeric data is stored and handled differently by Intel and other hardware architectures.

To provide compatibility of PC/IXF files among all products in the DB2® family, the export utility creates files with numeric data in Intel format, and the import utility expects it in this format.

Depending on the hardware platform, DB2 products convert numeric values between Intel and non-Intel formats (using byte reversal) during both export and import operations.

Implementations of DB2 database based on UNIX operating systems not create multiple-part PC/IXF files during export. However, they allow you to import a multiple-part PC/IXF file that was created by DB2. When importing this type of file, all parts should be in the same directory, otherwise an error is returned.

Single-part PC/IXF files created on UNIX operating systems with the DB2 export utility can be imported by DB2 database for Windows.

Delimited ASCII (DEL) file format

DEL files have differences based on the operating system on which they were created. The differences are:

Row separator characters
- Text files from UNIX operating systems use a line feed (LF) character.
- Text files from other operating systems use a carriage return/line feed (CRLF) sequence.
End-of-file character
- Text files from UNIX operating systems do not have an end-of-file character.
- Text files from other operating systems have an end-of-file character (X'1A').

Since DEL export files are text files, they can be transferred from one operating system to another. File transfer programs can handle operating system-dependant differences if you transfer the files in text mode; the conversion of row separator and end-of-file characters is not performed in binary mode.

Note: If character data fields contain row separator characters, these will also be converted during file transfer. This conversion causes unexpected changes to the data and, for this reason, it is recommended that you do not use DEL export files to move data across platforms. Use the PC/IXF file format instead.