Advanced · Flagship · 5 days · prerequisite: CS110 + CS120 (CS140 helpful)
The course nobody else teaches. EBCDIC and packed decimal for real, copybook-to-database mapping, batch-window handoffs, reconciliation chains — taught on a mixed estate that ships broken on purpose, one production defect class per lab.
Cohort / corporate first self-paced release follows recording
Every session ends in a lab on your own environment. Labs are machine-checked against expected outputs — you and your L&D team always know exactly where you stand.
Why the ledger stayed on the mainframe and the web went to a relational database; the batch-window handoff pattern — extract, transfer, load, post, reconcile; and why nobody owns the boundary.
LAB Walk the demo estate end to end while a clean cycle runs.
EBCDIC versus ASCII and code pages; packed decimal nibble by nibble — all six sign nibbles and why F0F1 is not 0x01; zoned overpunch; copybook offset arithmetic by hand.
LAB Decode a real extract with a hex viewer before any tool helps you.
The copybook versus the loader configuration that is actually deployed; record framing and LRECL; what drift does at load time and why the first record often survives it.
LAB The drift defect: diagnose a load abort from the bytes up.
Control trailers, counts and per-type totals; halt-versus-auto-correct decisions; late files and partial files; cross-platform scheduling and the window nobody checks.
LAB Two defects: the schema-valid-but-wrong control total, and the late file that posts yesterday.
Tracing one field from copybook byte range through staging to posted column; dead code in the posting layer; replaying a cycle and proving a fix byte-identical.
LAB Capstone: fix-the-drift — red run with evidence, apply the fix, green run proven.
Your seat is a private, full mixed demo estate: mainframe half plus a real relational target, seeded with five production-class defects in the browser — nothing to install, snapshot and reset per exercise. By the end of the course the lab harness will have verified: all five seeded-defect labs diagnosed and the fix-the-drift capstone proven green.