Data Movement Utilities Guide and Reference

Appendix C. Export/Import/Load Utility File Formats

Four operating system file formats supported by the DB2 export, import, and load utilities are described:

DEL

Delimited ASCII, for data exchange among a wide variety of database managers and file managers. This common approach to storing data uses special character delimiters to separate column values.

ASC

Non-delimited ASCII, for importing or loading data from other applications that create flat text files with aligned column data.

PC/IXF

PC version of the Integrated Exchange Format (IXF), the preferred method for data exchange within the database manager. PC/IXF is a structured description of a database table that contains an external representation of the internal table.

WSF

Work-sheet format, for data exchange with products such as Lotus 1-2-3 and Symphony. The load utility does not support this file format.

When using DEL, WSF, or ASC data file formats, define the table, including its column names and data types, before importing the file. The data types in the operating system file fields are converted into the corresponding type of data in the database table. The import utility accepts data with minor incompatibility problems, including character data imported with possible padding or truncation, and numeric data imported into different types of numeric fields.

When using the PC/IXF data file format, the table does not need to exist before beginning the import operation. User-defined distinct types (UDTs) are not made part of the new table column types; instead, the base type is used. Similarly, when exporting to the PC/IXF data file format, UDTs are stored as base data types in the PC/IXF file.