SSIS and EBCDIC

First and foremost, thanks to Douglas Laudenschlager for bringing this to my attention.

So with that out of the way, I'd like to point out that Amino Software have finally released their Lysine product, a custom SSIS component that enables the use of EBCDIC data in the SSIS data flow. Here's the blurb:

Lysine is an SSIS (SQL Server Integration Services) custom component that enables the inline conversion from EBCDIC (including redefines and packed decimal fields) into an ASCII byte stream to use within the pipeline in your SSIS package.

The major benefits of Lysine are two-fold:

1. It saves you from having to write a pre-processor to unpack and convert the binary data.
2. It prevents you from having to pre-process the data saving an extra, and many times costly, trip through the data.

Features

• Conversion of EBCDIC Field Types
  • Comp3
  • Zoned
  • Redefines
  • Occurs
  • Occurs Depending On
• Realtime preview of data as file definition is setup in an intuitive UI
• Inline processing of data -- a single pass through the data.

Now normally I would not simply copy and paste a software vendor's marketing blurb into my blog - not without getting some sort of kickback anyway - but since so far as I know there is no other software on the market that solves this problem, and since this problem seems to come up pretty often, I thought that this was a good time to make an exception. It's not free (and for $1,499 some might argue that it's not cheap either) but if you need to convert EBCDIC data to ASCII data, odd are it will pay for itself pretty quickly. I haven't had the time to run it through its paces (and with a little luck I won't see any EBCDIC in the near future) but if you're struggling with this pain today you might want to check it out. Enjoy!