What is considered as Mainframe data source for Catalyst?

[RadovanOresky]

Hi,

I'm going through the available technical documentation on QDC.

I would like to have a better understanding, what kind of data is considered as Mainframe.

Is it some special kind of data structure different than in standard relational database?

Any commentary and/or link or (the best) example would help.

Thanks in advance,

-Radovan

[Joe_DosSantos · Accepted solution]

Mainframes that were introduced in the 1960s and 1970s and are still in use at many large institutions, especially financial services institutions.    They are excellent at high volume transactional processing and store data in formats like EBCDIC and VSAM, file based structures.  Traditionally, it has been difficult to get data out of mainframes for reporting purposes because of these structures that differ from conventional RDBMS formats and also because they are generally built for OLTP workloads instead of OLAP workloads.

Qlik Data Catalyst has the ability to convert EBCDIC formats to standard delimited structures in Parquet, which is difficult for most institutions.

[jrenwa144 · Accepted solution]

I had the opportunity to work for a client to provision QDC. We were able to successfully ingest mainframe EBCIDIC files using QDC. The ingest is pretty fast and straightforward compared to traditional ETL tools like Informatica etc. Let me know if you are looking for any other information. 

Regards

Jitender Renwa

[MauriceP]

Being as old as and having worked on some of those mainframes(!) may I just clear up some terminology there Joe - EBCDIC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EBCDIC) is an encoding method much in the same way that ASCII or Latin-1 (ISO_8859-1) are, VSAM (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Storage_Access_Method) is an Access Method typically used to allow indexed access to data, the underlying data was encoded in EBCDIC.