Write numbers in binary form with UTL_FILE?

Anyone with experience writing binary data, to flat text Operating System files?

We're familiar with UTL_FILE, but it seems to convert everything to character before writing out.

We have a need on an EBCDIC platform for an extract from Oracle. That file needs to have binary data (that's COMP or COMP-3 in COBOL) within it. The binary number we need (which will always positive), will contain the LENGTH of a corresponding VARCHAR2 column.

The IBM needs it this way so it can load VARCHAR2 data from Oracle, into VARCHAR2 data in DB/2. I guess DB/2 isn't smart enough to parse the string and figure it out on it's own.

And we don't have any tools to get them to talk to one another.

So short of a solution within DB/2 (to eliminate that requirement) or Oracle, we'll need to resort to COBOL to re-create the file on the IBM side, using a CHAR field in the Oracle extract containing the length, which we'll then convert to COMP or COMP-3 on the IBM before the load to DB/2.

Kindly reply, if you would, to pennine.s_at_bcbsri.org, as I don't get out to the group that often.

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