The UNSTRING statement used to separate single string to multiple based on the delimiter provided in the UNSTRING. It needs at least two destination identifier or literals. It can only separate alphabetic and alpha-numeric items. END-STRING, DELIMITED BY, TALLYING, WITH POINTER, ON OVERFLOW and NOT ON OVERFLOW clause is optional in UNSTRING usage. UNSTRING statement
STRING statement strings together the partial or complete contents of two or more data items or literals into one single data item. STRING needs at least two identifiers or literals. It can only concatenate alphabetic and alpha-numeric items. It will remove multiple instances of delimiter character and consider multiple spaces as a single space. END-STRING,
COALESCE DB2 function is used to handle the NULL values that might be present in the data or a list of values that are specified. If the NOT NULL constraint on the column is not applied, then the default value that gets inserted in those columns when not specified is the NULL value. It returns the
COBOL Intrinsic Functions provides many ways to manipulate data. These are a set of functions that return values from a specific algorithm on input arguments. Intrinsic Functions are available for mathematics, character manipulation, date/time and statistics, and financial work. These functions are elementary data items that will return a numeric (whole or decimal) or an
SQL CASE statement allows you to perform IF-THEN-ELSE functionality within an SQL statement. CASE SQL expression can help make your data more readable and useful to the user or to the application. It allows selecting one sequence of statements to execute out of many possible sequences. There are two general flavors of the expression. In
GROUP BY clause specifies a result table that consists of a grouping of the rows of intermediate result table that is the result of the previous clause. The GROUP BY clause allows you to find the characteristics of groups of rows rather than individual rows. ORDER BY clause specifies the particular order in which you
PUSH defines the input field, sequence number, or identifier that will be overlaid for each group’s records. For fixed-length records, the first input and output data byte start at position 1. For variable-length records, the first input and output data byte start at position 5, after the RDW in positions 1-4. PUSH=(c:item,…) You can use
PARSE and IFTHEN PARSE are new options that allow you to extract variable position/length fields into fixed-length parsed fields defined as %nn fields. It gives you powerful new capabilities for handling variable fields such as delimited fields, comma-separated values (CSV), tab-separated values, blank-separated values, keyword-separated fields, null-terminated strings, and many other types. The PARSE parameter
Syntax: Starting position:SEQNUM,m,f,START=j,INCR=i,RESTART=(p,m) Name Description Starting Position Specifies the position from where the sequence number starts in the o/p file. SEQNUM A keyword specifies the sequence number to be generated from the next available position of INREC. Length (m) Length of the sequence number to be generated. Format (f) Format of the sequence number to
ICETOOL is a batch front-end utility that uses the capabilities of DFSORT toperform the operations you request. Input and output datasets can be defined using user-defined DD names. The file operations are specified in the TOOLIN DD statement. Additional conditions can be specified in user-defined ‘CTL’ DD statements. A few of the utilities of ICETOOL
ICETOOL : Matching records from different data sets Read More »
Fill Method Paired and unpaired records – This example illustrates an alternative way to create three output files; paired F1/F2 records, unpaired F1 records, and unpaired F2 records. It produces the same output as Example 5. Whereas Example 5 uses an indicator in one position to determine where the key was found, Example 6 uses
Indicator method: Paired and unpaired records – This example illustrates how you can create three output files; paired F1/F2 records, unpaired F1 records, and unpaired F2 records. In this case: F1 records which do not have a match in F2 on the specified keys (for example, key=David) will be written to the F1ONLY output file.
Unpaired records F2: This example illustrates how you can select only unpaired records from one of two files. In this case, we will select the F2 records that do not have a match in F1 on the specified keys (for example, key1=Molly and key2=2100). We will also omit certain records from each input file and
Paired records F1 – Below example illustrates how you can select only paired records from one of two files. In this case, we will select the F1 records that have a match in F2 on the specified keys (for example, key1=Development and key2=Master). The F1 records are in comma-delimited form so we will parse them
Paired records with duplicates: This example illustrates how you can join paired records from two files, both of which have duplicate records. The result will be a cartesian join. The paired records are the records in F1 and F2 with matching keys (for example, key=Cats). Paired records with duplicates Example //SEP002 EXEC PGM=SORT //SYSOUT DD
Paired records without duplicates – ASA (formerly ANSI)control characters appear in Position 5 for variable-length records (just after the Record Descriptor Word (RDW)). So coding REMOVECC on the OUTFIL statement suppresses the control characters. This example illustrates how you can join paired records from two files using multiple keys. In this case, neither file has
JOINKEYS feature joins transactions/records from two different files based on certain keys (i.e. fields with common information). The SORTJNF1 and SORTJNF2 DD statements were used to specify these files. Each JOINKEYS statement must specify the DDNAME of the file it applies to and the starting position, length, and sequence of the keys in that file. You
STOPAFTÂ SKIPREC are two powerful control parameters in IBM DFSORT that allow you to precisely control which records are processed during sorting, merging, or copying operations. These parameters help optimize performance by reducing the amount of data processed and enable selective record processing without requiring complex programming logic. STOPAFT and SKIPREC are optional parameters and can
INCLUDE OMIT conditions in SORT JCL (DFSORT, Syncsort) are powerful filters that decide which input records are passed on for sorting, copying, or merging and which are discarded. By pushing this filtering logic into the sort utility, jobs often run faster and more efficiently because unnecessary records are removed before the heavier operations run. You
There are multiple Date Functions by which you can reformat input dates. Modern mainframe jobs frequently need to stamp files with run-date timestamps, convert between Julian and Gregorian calendars, subtract business days, and generate aging metrics. DFSORT’s powerful DATE functions—available through INREC, OUTREC, OUTFIL, and ICETOOL—let you accomplish all of this with a few control-card
Header and trailer records are a common requirement in mainframe reporting, especially when you want to present a clean business report instead of raw input records. In SYNCSORT, you typically use OUTFIL with HEADER1, HEADER2, TRAILER1, and TRAILER2 to generate report titles, page headings, summary lines, counts, and totals. HEADER DETAILS Headers are used to provide a report, page, and section headings
The IEFBR14 JCL utility is a dummy utility provided by IBM and its only purpose is to help meet the requirements that a job must have at least one EXEC statement. The real purpose is to allow the disposition of the DD statement to occur. IEFBR14 doesn’t return any other return codes except ZERO or
DB2 Join:Â An INNER JOIN finds and returns matching data from tables, while an outer join finds and returns matching data and some dissimilar data from tables. An inner join finds and returns matching data from tables, while an outer join finds and returns matching data and some dissimilar data from tables. For combining two sets
IFTHEN statements allow you to reformat different records in different ways by specifying how build or overlay items are to be applied to records that meet given criteria. Use IFTHEN statements if you want to insert, rearrange, delete or overlay fields in different ways for different records. IFTHEN clauses for the OUTREC statement can be
POINTER is one of the data types in COBOL. A variable defined as data type POINTER can store the memory address of the other variables used in the program. There are different ways in which we can use POINTER variables in our program to achieve different tasks. One such example is retrieving data from “Linked
