
8.5 Value-Level Remedies 16 9
ONE
of the most common mistakes
made in moving data is to automati-
cally assume that a l-byte CHARAC-
TER column in one system can be
mapped to a/-byte CHARACTER
column in the other system without
looking at the data. A real example is
the gender code that in one source sys-
tem was encoded I and 2 and in the
target system was encoded F and M.
Additionally, a second source system
was encoded M and F but had some
other curious values stored. In this
example the user moved the data with-
out looking at values and created a
mess in the target system.
Value-Level Remedies
The column property analysis