I'll preface this with saying that I'm a .NET developer, and am NOT an RPG developer. I'm working with one of our RPG developers to come up with a solution, so any suggestions you provide will get passed to him.

We have a scenario where we want our iSeries to read from a SQL Server database. One of the columns is a TEXT column. IN RPG, there is no equivalent data type to use for this.

We've gone back and forth on this, and our current plan is to change course, and have our SQL Server write out a text file, which the iSeries can pick up and parse. This is, however, a last resort option, as the data in the file is sensitive, and we'd like to avoid the additional security overhead.

We've already got the SQL Server locked down as tight as possible (one user only has read access to this, and that user is an iSeries user.) We don't want to have to worry about transferring files back and forth. However, at this point, we see no other option. We have no in-house Java developers, and need to do this in RPG.

So I'm wondering if there are any RPG developers out there who have faced this situation and have any advice.