The DESCRIPTION command defines the format of a record in a datastore. The format can be defined by:
- COBOL copybook
- IMS Hierarchical DBDs
- Relational Table DDL
- XML Document Type Definition (DTD)
- C header
- Directly from a relational database catalog.
Most but not every Data Type is also supported both for capture and replication. Some however cannot be mapped to dissimilar Data Types on other platforms.
The DESCRIPTION command is used in conjunction with the DATASTORE command and must be specified before the corresponding DATASTORE command.