Because mainframes typically host critical business data, modernizing data is one of the most important tasks when migrating data to the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud or other American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) environment. On mainframes, data is typically encoded in extended binary-coded decimal interchange code (EBCDIC) format. Exporting database, Virtual Storage Access Method (VSAM), or flat files generally produces packed, binary EBCDIC files, which are more complex to migrate. The most commonly used database migration solution is change data capture (CDC), which, in most cases, automatically converts data encoding. However, CDC mechanisms might not be available for these database, VSAM, or flat files. For these files, an alternative approach is required to modernize the data.
