Error pulling unicode data from DB2 Linked Server

Greetings,

We have been Selecting data from A DB2 AS400 via Linked Servers in SQL 7.

We began to pull data from new intstance/tables that contain some fields with foreign characters. (double byte, unicode) Some data will pull fine, then we will get an error:

Unexpected NULL value returned for column '[MYLINKEDSERVER].[DB2NAME1].[DB2NAME2].[MYTABLENAME].DESC2' from the OLE DB provider 'MSDASQL'. This column cannot be NULL.

The DBA from the other country tells me that the field is never null.

KB article Q239458 seemed related but doesn't help. We are running SP4, and will be trying on SP3 soon.

Is there any way to turn off this checking for NULL? My guess is that it interprets the unicode as a NULL incorrectly. I've tried to explicitly cast into varchar(30.)

Sometimes this fields is readable in English and it contains data that is critical when we can see it.

Thanks In Advance,
MikeyrowThe Work-Around developed was to use a pass-thru query to the DB2. I used a NULLIF function to replace any nulls, and that prevented the OLE-DB layer from erroring and failing.

Ideally we would want the DBA in the other country to fix this themselves, but sometimes time won't allow the cogs to churn enough to get the ideal solution developed.

Mike Rowland