Story

Definition

IXF stands for “IBM eXchange Format,” and it is a file format used by IBM’s DB2 database system for data import and export operations. The IXF format provides a standardized and efficient way to exchange data between DB2 databases or between DB2 and other systems.

Context

At work, we encountered the need to extract data from our DB2 database for analysis purposes. However, obtaining the data in a usable format proved to be a challenge. The IT department provided us with IXF files containing the exported data, but we required a solution to parse and process this data effectively.

Solution

To address this issue, I developed a package that simplifies the parsing of IXF files. This package builds upon existing open-source projects, which proved to be valuable resources. By leveraging these projects, I was able to create a package that streamlines the parsing of IXF files and offers various output options.

Package Features

The IXF Parser package offers the following features:

1. Parsing IXF Files: The package allows for the parsing of IXF files, extracting the rows of data contained within.

2. Conversion to Multiple Formats: The parsed data can be converted to different formats, including JSON, JSONLINE, CSV, Parquet and Deltalake.

3. Support for File-Like Objects: The package supports file-like objects as input, enabling the direct parsing of IXF data from file objects.

4. Minimal dependencies: The package has few dependencies (ebcdic, pyarrow, deltalake, chardet, typer) which are automatically installed alongside the package.

5. CLI: Command line tool called db2ixf (Does not support Deltalake).