IBM Data Platform Ideas Portal for Customers


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Status Submitted
Workspace Db2
Components Db2 Connect and Drivers
Created by Guest
Created on Sep 3, 2026

RELATED IDEAS

Expose column-level CCSID metadata in DbDataReader and support automatic/configurable CCSID 65535 conversion in the IBM .NET provider for Db2 on i.

Why is it useful?
In modern enterprise architectures, applications are often deployed as multi-tenant or multi-company systems connecting to IBM i. In these environments, identical tables and columns across different company schemas/libraries may use inconsistent CCSIDs (e.g., some companies use CCSID 65535 for text data, while others use CCSID 37).

Currently, developers must maintain complex, massive, and hard-to-maintain mapping files on the application side, or run high-latency, separate queries to the system catalog tables before every execution to know how to decode returned columns.

Who would benefit from it?
Any enterprise development team building modern .NET (including .NET 8/9 and EF Core) cloud-native microservices or multi-tenant SaaS applications running on Linux/Docker containers connecting to IBM i.

How should it work?
We propose two complementary solutions that IBM could implement in the provider (`Net.IBM.Data.Db2-lnx`):

1. Expose CCSID in Metadata: Return the specific source column CCSID as part of the query result-set metadata. This metadata should be accessible directly from the `DbDataReader` (for example, via a custom property in the schema table returned by `GetSchemaTable()` or `GetColumnSchema()`) during standard query execution, without requiring secondary database trips.
2. Automatic/Fallback Conversion: Provide a connection-string parameter or provider setting (e.g., `TranslateCcsid65535=True`) that tells the driver to automatically decode CCSID 65535 columns using the host Job CCSID, connection CCSID, or a specified fallback textual CCSID.

Needed By Yesterday (Let's go already!)

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