Jeff, the IBM documentation is very good. You can find it at http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/iseries/

The copy commands I mentioned earlier are built in to the AS400, and cna be scheduled if your AS400 guys write a short CL program to extract the data you want. CL is just a batch file with commands in it.

You can also ftp data, but there's no translation of the IBM packed decimal format of numbers into something that is usable in SQL server. It's not hard to write a translator for that, and ftp is very fast.

I feel your pain on losing tools. I had a senior IT manager ask me why anyone would want to get data out of the system. "If they need data, they should have a report written". He had no clue as to how the system was used, he jsut wanted to cut costs, no matter the impact.