Special Handling of Key Items in Discard Files

Because the stored procedures used during update processing use equality tests in the where clauses, key items (items that are used in the index for a table) can never assume a NULL value. In relational databases, you cannot use equality tests for items that have a value of NULL.

If a key item has a data error or a value of NULL, DATABridge places the entire record in a discard file named tablename.bad in the discards subdirectory. The syntax for discard file data is the calling sequence that would typically be used for the stored procedure that performs the update. Therefore, discarded records from both the data extraction and update phases are identical. DATABridge preserves bad numeric digits and characters to help you better troubleshoot the problem.