Best way to produce automated exports in tab-delimited form from Teradata?

Question

I would like to be able to produce a file by running a command or batch which basically exports a table or view (SELECT * FROM tbl), in text form (default conversions to text for dates, numbers, etc are fine), tab-delimited, with NULLs being converted to empty field (i.e. a NULL colum would have no space between tab characters, with appropriate line termination (CRLF or Windows), preferably also with column headings.

This is the same export I can get in SQL Assistant 12.0, but choosing the export option, using tab delimiter, setting my NULL value to '' and including column headings.

I have been unable to find the right combination of options - the closest I have gotten is by building a single column with CAST and '09'XC, but the rows still have a leading 2-byte length indicator in most settings I have tried. I would prefer not to have to build large strings for the various different tables.

Answer 1

To eliminate the 2-byte in the FastExport output:

.EXPORT OUTFILE &dwoutfile MODE RECORD FORMAT TEXT;

And your SELECT must generate a fixed length export field e.g. CHAR(n). So you will inflate the size of the file and end up with a delimited but fixed length export file.

The other option is if you are in a UNIX/Linux environment you can post process the file and strip the leading two bytes or write an ASXMOD in C to do it as the records are streamed to the file.