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IBM believes that the request described has been solved.
As mentioned in an earlier update, we have had several alternate solutions for looking at this data for many years. With the introduction of DB PTF Groups IBM i 7.4 SF99704 Level 7 and IBM i 7.3 SF99703 Level 18, an additional tool has been added. The INTERPRET SQL function can be used to substring specific column information from this BLOB column.
We have 3 alternative solutions for you to consider using:
1) System i Navigator and IBM i Access Client Solutions contain the ability to render the ESD in character form. Once a journal entry has been found, choose the "View Data" option to see the data in a more easily understood form.
2) With IBM i 7.3, you can use the System period Temporal table support to direct DB2 for i to maintain the history of the table. Then, instead of using the data journal, you could simply execute a query to understand how specific rows have changed over time.
3) Our Lab Based Services team has an Asset that can be called to turn data journal detail into a relational table. The asset can be purchased with a site wide license.
Please use one or more of the options listed above.
Regards, Scott Forstie
If they cannot make it text, perhaps due that some of the columns may contain some non traditional data, could they allow us to map that against the file the journal entry was recorded for so we can overlay it with the file description and extract the "before" and "after" images?
In RPG we would put the proper offset of this blob into an externally defined data structure based on the file.