Output field positioning and size

Use the POSITION option to specify field position in the output records. You can also specify the size of the output data field by using the length parameter for a particular data type. The length parameter must indicate the size of the actual data field. The start parameter of the POSITION option indicates the starting position of a field, including the NULL indicator byte (if the field can be null) and the length field (if the field is varying length).

Using the POSITION parameter, the length parameter, or both can restrict the size of the data field in the output records. Use care when specifying the POSITION and length parameters, especially for nullable fields and varying length fields. If a conflict exists between the length parameter and the size of the field in the output record that is specified by the POSITION parameters, Db2 issues an error message, and the UNLOAD utility terminates. If an error occurs, the count of the number of records in error is incremented. See the description of the MAXERR option of UNLOAD for more information.

If you specify a length parameter for a varying-length field and you also specify the NOPAD option, length indicates the maximum length of data that is to be unloaded. Without the NOPAD option, UNLOAD reserves a space of the given length instead of the maximum data size.

If you explicitly specify start parameters for certain fields, they must be listed in ascending order in the field selection list. Unless you specify HEADER NONE for the table, a fixed-length record header is placed at the beginning of each record for the table, and the start parameter must not overlap the record header area.

The TRUNCATE option is available for certain output field types. For the output field types where the TRUNCATE option is not applicable, enough space must be provided in the output record for each field.