FHG Volume: 10 Archives - Page 8 of 12

Prompt and Submit CL Commands

May 19, 2010 Ted Holt

I am a blessed man. Among the niceties of life that I enjoy are hot and cold running water, central heat and air conditioning, abundant food, and the CL command prompter. Many people are not so fortunate.

The CL command prompter provides a functional way to pass properly formatted data to a program so the program can do what it was made to do. Developers who work on other systems can only dream of such a facility.

To prompt a command from a CL command line is simple: type the command name and press F4. I doubt this is news

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Admin Alert: CBU Product License Keys Can and Will Suddenly Expire

May 19, 2010 Joe Hertvik

One of my Power i Capacity BackUp (CBU) systems hit the wall last week. All of a sudden, none of our administrators could start a PC5250 green-screen session on the CBU. Each time they clicked on a PC5250 session icon, the user received an obscure CWBLM0020 error and they couldn’t get to the system. Here’s what happened and how it can affect any shop with an i/OS CBU system.

The Symptoms

When one of our administrators went to start a PC5250 session on our CBU, the session refused to start and she received the following error.

CWBLM0020 - Failure--Licensing Failure

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Development Environments

May 12, 2010 Paul Tuohy

It happens at every conference I speak at. Over a cup of coffee (or other liquid refreshment) someone will ask me about my development environment.

How many libraries do you use?
Where do you keep source–especially for service programs?
How do you manage binder language?

So, if for no other reason than allowing me to answer with: “you can read about it at IT Jungle,” here is a description of my current development environment for a little System i Developer application I’m working on.

But First

Of course, your development environment may well be dictated by a change management system.

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Two Ways to Prevent Division by Zero in SQL

May 12, 2010 Ted Holt

Everybody above the age of 8 knows that division by zero is a no-no, or at least they should. Everybody who’s used SQL for any amount of time knows that we can use a CASE expression to prevent division by zero. But do you know the other way to prevent division by zero in SQL?

Assume a database file called SomeTable, with fields called Quantity and Amount. Let’s divide Amount by Quantity. First, here’s the usual case statement.

select itnbr, Amount, Quantity,
       case when Quantity <> 0
               then Amount / Quantity
            else 0 end
  from SomeTable

If Quantity is not

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Admin Alert: Diary of a Production System Upgrade, Part 2

May 12, 2010 Joe Hertvik

Last issue, I began discussing a Power i/Power 6 upgrade that was recently completed in my shop. This review served as a case study for discussing some techniques and pitfalls in bringing up new hardware. I’m offering this examination to document some lessons I learned while upgrading in order to help other i/OS administrators who are installing new hardware. This week, let’s continue the story.

I previously documented how we started swapping out an existing production System i/Power 5 machine for an upgraded model 8204 IBM i Power 6 box with 96 Gb of memory and 4 processors. Over

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Files in Subprocedures

April 28, 2010 Jon Paris

Subprocedures have been with us since V3R2/V3R6 and have had a major impact on the way that we build applications. Or at least they should have done. Sadly, many RPGers remain firmly rooted in the past.

Those of you who do make regular use of subprocedures have undoubtedly found yourself wishing from time to time that you could define files within them rather than having to resort to accessing globally defined files. With the advent of the 6.1 release of the IBM i operating system, your wishes were granted. Files can indeed now be defined within subprocedures.

The sample subprocedure

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Let One Row Represent a Group

April 28, 2010 Ted Holt

Dear Esteemed and Highly Competent Professional,

From time to time, I need to retrieve one row (record) to represent a group of rows that share similar characteristics. It’s a good technique, one that I’d like to share with the readers of this unpretentious publication.

Assume a table (physical file) of sales order details. Each row represents a line of a customer order. Some customers submit an entire order at the same time, but others prefer to keep one order open with us, adding new lines to the order as needed. Here are the columns (fields) of the sales order detail

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Admin Alert: Diary of a Production System Upgrade, Part 1

April 28, 2010 Joe Hertvik

Last week, my shop replaced an existing production System i 550 machine with an upgraded Power 6 system. Our plan was to switch production processing to our Capacity BackUp (CBU) machine, configure the new machine, and then switch back. This week and next, I’ll review our installation as a mini-case study and discuss what lessons it can provide to other i/OS system administrators.

The Plan

At upgrade time, our System i/Power i configuration consisted of the following components:

A System i 550 Power 5 machine equipped with 32 Gb of memory, three processors, and two partitions: a production partition and

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FAQs for MySQL and the DB2 Storage Engine

April 21, 2010 Susan Gantner

In a couple of past tips, I’ve been exploring aspects about using MySQL on i and especially the ability to use the DB2 for i Storage Engine to make the MySQL data accessible from “native” DB2-based applications and tools. In this tip, I’ll cover a couple of questions that often arise related to this topic.

How does database object security work with MySQL and the DB2 for i storage engine?

MySQL has its own security implementation that governs how users may access data. Users and their authorities to databases and tables are set up in MySQL and are unrelated to

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Yet Another Super-Easy Way to Copy a Spooled File from One Partition to Another

April 21, 2010 Hey, Ted

I saw the tip Another Super-Easy Way to Copy a Spooled File from One Machine to Another and wanted to add to the discussion.

In our shop, we have one machine with two partitions–one for production, one for testing and development. On the production system, we have a TEST outq. On the test system, we have a PROD outq. Sending spooled files from one machine to the other is a simple matter of using the CHGSPLF command (option 2 from panels that display spool files) to change the outq name. The CL we used to create the output queues is

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