• Admin Alert: The i5 Battery Checking Process

  May 9, 2007 Joe Hervtik

  What you can’t see can slow down i5 disk performance, particularly when you’re dealing with the lithium ion batteries that i5 I/O adapters use to provide hard disk drive caching. Fortunately, the system i5 will warn you about aging batteries but if you ignore its warnings, failed batteries can adversely affect disk drive performance. The good news is that it’s easy for IBM service to replace old batteries but there are a few tricks in determining when replacement is necessary. Why Regular Battery Changes Are Important Lithium ion battery packs provide power for disk caching on your i5 disk arrays.

  …

  Read more

• Monitor for Specific Messages in RPG

  May 2, 2007 Hey, Ted

  I have a CL program that calls another CL program and monitors for specific escape messages. No big deal. I put multiple Monitor Message (MONMSG) commands after the CALL. Suppose I want to call the second CL program from an RPG program. How do I monitor for the different errors? –Ray OK, Ray, let’s set this up for the readers. Let’s suppose your program, which we’ll call SOMEPGM, can return escape messages MYM2101 and MYM2105. A CL caller monitors for those messages like this: CALL PGM(SOMEPGM) PARM(&whatever) MONMSG MSGID(MYM2101) EXEC(DO) /* do something */ ENDDO MONMSG MSGID(MYM2105) EXEC(DO) /* do

  …

  Read more

• Overcome the Page Control Limitations of iSeries Access Printer Emulation Sessions

  May 2, 2007 Michael Sansoterra

  Over the years, iSeries Access virtual printer emulation sessions have been used to successfully print a variety of spool file reports from System i and AS/400 systems to a local PC printer. Regardless of the report’s page attributes (page orientation, lines per inch, characters per inch, number of columns, etc.), the printer emulator will often successfully and automatically correct the output and automatically adjust the spool file’s page settings to print successfully to a local printer. However, in other cases it seems like it takes quite a bit of tinkering to get various spool files to print correctly to a

  …

  Read more

• Admin Alert: Dealing with i5 Critical Storage Errors,

  May 2, 2007 Joe Hertvik

  Part 2 In the last issue, I discussed some tricks for monitoring your system to detect storage problems. Today, I want to shift the focus from determining when your disk storage is filling up to what you can do to increase available drive space. I’ll do this by providing a checklist of several different techniques you can perform to retrieve system storage space that you might have thought was lost forever. Finding the Right Cure for Your Storage Woes Disk drive capacity issues can cause system problems when i5 storage usage passes the 90 percent level. Performance degradation starts

  …

  Read more

• What Can I Select When I Group?

  April 25, 2007 Dear highly esteemed professional colleague

  It’s not uncommon for someone to ask me for help with error SQL0122, which involves SQL commands that use the GROUP BY clause to produce summary figures. Since I see this error over and over and over, I thought it would be good to explain how summary queries work. The standard rule I hear is that the SELECT clause of summary queries can list aggregate fields (those in the GROUP BY clause), expressions that are in the GROUP BY clause, and column functions, such as COUNT, SUM, and AVG. That’s close, but slightly inaccurate. A reader who contacted me recently

  …

  Read more

• To Shift or Not to Shift: That Is in the Fourth Parameter

  April 25, 2007 Ted Holt

  RPG’s %REPLACE function is marvelous. When I think of all those array-manipulation calcs I wrote in my System/34 and System/36 days, I could cry. Anyway, to use %REPLACE effectively, it is good to ask oneself a simple question: In the event that the replacement string and the string of characters that is being replaced are not the same length, do I, or do I not, want the characters that follow the replacement to shift? This is the same question SEU asks on the Find/Change Options panel. Informing SEU of your desire is an almost effortless matter of typing a Y

  …

  Read more

• Admin Alert: Dealing with i5 Critical Storage Errors,

  April 25, 2007 Joe Hertvik

  Part 1 Critical storage errors can occur whenever i5 hard drive usage passes 90 percent of available storage space. Above 90 percent, system performance starts to degrade. When storage usage breaches 95 percent, the system can become unstable and turn itself off or spontaneously reboot. While you can’t predict when critical storage errors will occur, there are several things you can do to detect and cleanup storage problems before they crash your system. What’s the Disk Facts, Jack? This week and next week, I’ll deal with the issues involved in monitoring and correcting critical storage errors or storage overflow conditions.

  …

  Read more

• Calling SQL Functions Directly From a High Level Language Program

  April 18, 2007 Hey, Mike

  The Create SQL Function from the article SQL Cross Platform Interoperability: The Proper Function creates a CLE *srvpgm on the iSeries. Can this be accessed from an RPGLE program? If so, what would the prototype look like? I am not familiar with C and cannot get this to work, so far, on my own. –Gene Note: The code accompanying this article can be downloaded here. This astute reader noticed that when creating an SQL-based function, DB2 generates an ILE C service program behind the scenes. This prompted the reader to inquire if there was a way to call the

  …

  Read more

• My Favorite Keyboard Shortcuts for RSE

  April 18, 2007 Susan Gantner

  When using RSE for editing my CL, DDS, RPG or COBOL code, I find that I can save a lot of time by using keyboard shortcuts for functions that would otherwise require that I take my hands off the keyboard to use the mouse. So I thought I would share a few of my favorites. Many of the shortcuts I use are standard for other Windows-based applications that I also use for email, spreadsheets or text editing. These include some very common ones such as: Ctl-C to copy, Ctl-V, or Shift-Insert to paste, and Ctl-X or Shift-Delete to cut.

  …

  Read more

• Two Ways to Audit Your Backup Strategy

  April 18, 2007 Hey, Joe

  Nice article on five things that kill backups. In regards to auditing backup results, however, I find it a little tedious to check joblogs as you recommended. I prefer to use the Display Log command for reviewing the system history log to check backup results. It’s easy to spot missed objects from this display. I also like to use the Display Backup List command (DSPBCKUPL) for Sarbanes-Oxley compliance. –Bill Thanks, Bill for bringing up two ideas I hadn’t thought of when I wrote that article. Here are the details on what Bill is discussing and how it can help

  …

  Read more

Previous Articles Next Articles