Ab initio "load ready" files

Wow. What a crappy site.

"Load Ready" just means the data in the file is ready to be imported into a database and you shouldn't have any errors or problems. The file and the data in it are essentially "pre-screened" and verified to be accurate and follow all the rules of the database before the import is started.

Looking at some other questions on Al Initio, it may be that a .DAT file is just a text file with fixed column widths, but, of course, that doesn't take into account the compression, which I couldn't find any information on.

Oracle has a configuration in their GoldenGate product that appears to describe the Ab Initio file format in GoldenGate terms, for what it's worth:

writer.mode=LDV 
writer.files.onepertable=false 
writer.files.data.ext=.data 
writer.files.data.tmpext=.temp 
writer.metacols=position,timestamp,opcode,txind,schema,table 
writer.metacols.timestamp.fixedlen=26 
writer.metacols.schema.fixedjustify=right 
writer.metacols.schema.fixedpadchar.chars=Y 
writer.metacols.opcode.fixedlen=1 
writer.metacols.opcode.insert.chars=I 
writer.metacols.opcode.update.chars=U 
writer.metacols.opcode.delete.chars=D 
writer.metacols.txind.fixedlen=1 
writer.metacols.txind.begin.chars=B 
writer.metacols.txind.middle.chars=M 
writer.metacols.txind.end.chars=E 
writer.metacols.txind.whole.chars=W 
writer.metacols.position.format=dec 
writer.ldv.vals.missing.chars=M 
writer.ldv.vals.present.chars=P 
writer.ldv.vals.null.chars=N 
writer.ldv.lengths.record.mode=binary 
writer.ldv.lengths.record.length=4 
writer.ldv.lengths.field.mode=binary 
writer.ldv.lengths.field.length=2 
writer.statistics.period=onrollover 
writer.statistics.tosummaryfile=true 
writer.statistics.overall=true 
writer.statistics.summary.fileformat=schema,table,schemaandtable,total, 
gctimestamp,ctimestamp 
writer.statistics.summary.delimiter.chars=| 
writer.statistics.summary.eol.chars=\n