Actually, the source database is a wierd beast called Versant. It's rather an object persistence store than a database, and it is non-relational.

When it comes to locking strategies, Versant tends to assume that you know what you are doing (something which was not the case in this instance).

Why not have the one database dump its table using its native tools?

That's a thought. The client where I am working do tend to have a philosophy of doing everything in application code (C++, yeugh). I looked at

db2tty -D $DBAME -i myClass
[download]

and this does dump all objects in myClass to stdout. There are issues with escaping and format conversion, and it would be hard to convince my colleagues to abandon the extractor code they are already using.

Anyone else out there using Versant?