I’ve written tips about RSE/RDi keyboard shortcuts several times before. Readers of those tips will know that I created a downloadable list of my favorite keyboard shortcuts. I’ve updated the shortcut card fairly regularly and the most recent edition has recently become available. So if you have previously downloaded my shortcut card and found it useful, you may want to get the latest one here.

This edition of the card includes a few new shortcuts, including a couple that are new for V9.5 of RDi.

The first one is Ctrl+Alt+Q, a new V9.5 shortcut to bring up a dialog

It’s a new year! Out with the old! In with the new! That exhortation applies not only to everyday life, but also to the ways we write SQL queries. Let me show you two ways we used to have to write summary queries and two new ways that are better.

First, we need a database to query. Here’s a table of customers.

 ID   Name
===   =====================
101   J. Cheever Loophole  
102   Otis B. Driftwood    
103   Quincy Adams Wagstaff
104   Rufus T. Firefly

And here’s a table of shipments.

ID   CUSTOMER   ITEM    QUANTITY   PRICE
===  ========   ======  ========   =====
 1       102    

LIMIT and OFFSET are two new query options that will please every developer who builds user interfaces (UI) involving potentially large result sets. Handling UI queries that return a large number of rows can be annoying as they may take too long to process, create heavy network traffic, and require a web or desktop client to cache the result set. Further, it’s unlikely a user will review all the rows! But what if DB2 returns only what is needed by giving back one slice of the entire result set on demand?

This is where the new LIMIT and OFFSET features