Greg Snidow (1/11/2012)
Thank you both for the tips. After doing some research (google), I believe I am working with a packed decimal field. I suspected this was the case when I FTP'd a text extract, and the data looked like a bunch of non-language characters. I found some stuff on EBCDIC, and this looks like what I have. Any ideas how to deal with this? I saw a post from 2007 here about converting it when imported from a text file, but nothing about how to deal with it when getting it VIA linked server.
Just out of interest, what are you using to connect to DB2? I only ask because, although I have never used a DB2 linked server myself, I have used many other types, and it really ought not to be this hard. There's a bunch of stuff out there about connecting to DB2, this is just one promising link I found on a quick search: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dotnetinterop/archive/2006/01/20/defining-a-db2-as-a-linked-server.aspx
Paul White
SQLPerformance.com
SQLkiwi blog
@SQL_Kiwi