The long awaited announcement of IBM i 7.2 comes with several enhancements to DB2 for i. In this tip, I’m going to explore the new set of built-in global variables that come with DB2 for i 7.2. If you’re unfamiliar with global variables, see New in DB2 for i 7.1: Use Global Variables to Track Environment Settings or the CREATE VARIABLE statement.

The list of built-in global variables can be divided into three groups:

Group 1: Client TCP/IP Info

CLIENT_IPADDR VARCHAR(128)

CLIENT_PORT INT

As their names imply, these global variables return the IP address and port of the current client’s

Fortunately, IBM i has an Integrated File System (IFS), into which you can store any kind of data your heart desires. Fortunately, IBM provides an API that your programs can use to retrieve information about IFS stream files. Unfortunately, this API is rooted in the Unix world. Unfortunately, timestamps are stored in what I would call a bizarre manner. Fortunately, you are intelligent enough to learn how this API works.

When you need to know programmatically about a stream file, you can use the stat API. Like many things UNIX, stat is idiosyncratic, especially in the way that it reports

One interesting feature of the IBM i operating system is that under certain circumstances, journaling can actually slow down batch job performance. Here’s a real-life case study of how journaling can slow down processing and what tools IBM provides to handle the situation.

When Journaling Attacks

After migrating a production IBM i partition to a new Power 7+ machine from Power 6 hardware, a batch job that previously took five hours to complete was now taking over 11 hours to finish and had to be cancelled each time it ran. This package rebuilt an item table in the company’s ERP