Data Type Support

While most of the data types in DB2 are supported by the tool, there are a few exceptions.

Lack of support may be due to a delay between a new type being added to DB2 and support for the new type being added to provider APIs, or because SQL Server does not have a suitable type to map the new DB2 type to. For instance, DECFLOAT (16 byte float) and XML are among the new data types added to DB2 for z/OS v9.1. Because there is no corresponding 16 byte float data type in SQL Server 2008, both the Microsoft and IBM OLE DB Providers output it as 8 byte float, suffering from potential loss of precision.

The BLOB data type is not supported by the current version (2.0) of Microsoft OLE DB Provider for DB2. Check with Microsoft to see when this data type will be supported. For the XML data type, neither Microsoft OLE DB Provider for DB2 supports it nor does IBM OLE DB Provider, in their current versions. The IBM DB2 .NET Data Provider is a promising alternative to the OLE DB Providers for DB2, as it supports the XML data type. It will be incorporated in the tool in the future. However, its current version (v9.5.3) wrongly outputs DECFLOAT(p) as Numeric(p,0) with 0 scale, where p stands for the precision.

For SQL Server 2008, the SQL Server OLE DB/Native Client supports all the incoming data types.