About Migrating a Siebel Database to Unicode Format

You can migrate your Siebel database from either an ASCII or EBCDIC encoding system to a Unicode encoding system if the following conditions are met:

  • You are using a Innovation Pack 2017 with DB2 Version for z/OS.

  • You are migrating to a DB2 version for z/OS subsystem.

When you migrate your Siebel schema from an ASCII or EBCDIC encoding system to a Unicode encoding system, all of the source tables that are marked as active in the repository are migrated to new target tables which are in Unicode format. Tables that are defined as inactive in the repository are not built in the Unicode target schema.

Migrating to Unicode involves the following steps:

  1. Siebel CRM 17.0 and later supports Unicode UTF-16 encoding, that is, it uses a double-byte character encoding scheme. To migrate to Unicode, Siebel database utilities first convert the existing schema to a schema that supports UTF-16.

  2. Siebel CRM database utilities then build SQL CREATE schema control cards and JCL templates, which are transferred to the z/OS host and applied to create the target database schema.

  3. Finally, data is migrated from the source ASCII or EBCDIC database to the target (Unicode) database using Cross Loader SQL control cards; these are built using options available on the Siebel Unicode Migration Option Menu on the z/OS host.

Caution: Migrating to Unicode is more complex than simply importing your existing data into a Unicode database. Failure to execute the migration correctly can result in serious data corruption or unrecoverable data loss. For this reason, the participation of Oracle’s Application Expert Services is mandatory if you perform a Unicode migration. Contact your Oracle sales representative for Oracle Advanced Customer Services to request assistance from Oracle’s Application Expert Services.