Introduction

This project brings LegStar and Pentaho Data Integration (Kettle) together.

The objective is to simplify integration with IBM mainframe data files such as QSAM, VSAM or IMS-DB segments.

LegStar is a code generator that uses COBOL copybooks to generate java Transformers classes.

LegStar for PDI is a PDI step that reads mainframe records from a file and transforms them into PDI rows.

You can combine the LegStar for PDI step with any of the native PDI steps to form complex PDI transformations:

Use case

IBM mainframe file records are usually described by COBOL copybooks. Records are fixed or variable length.

Records are likely to contain data items encoded in mainframe specific formats:

EBCDIC character strings without delimiters

compressed numerics (COMP, COMP-3)

numerics with overpunch sign characters

variable size arrays (depending on)

redefines, ...

It is relatively easy to copy such files to a machine running Pentaho Data Integration but what is needed is some means of reading the content and convert it to a format which makes it easy for PDI steps to manipulate.

Status

This is an early, but operational, release of the product.

We are looking for feedbacks from the community.

You are welcome to install the product and follow instructions on the get started document.