I am trying to use an edit word to insert hyphens into an account number. I must be doing something wrong, because leading zeros don’t show up. I’ve used edit codes for years, but rarely edit words. Can you help?

–Laurie

You’re not doing anything wrong. That’s the way edit words work, Laurie. The system blanks out everything before the first non-zero digit, including editing characters. The good news is there’s a way around it.

Let’s illustrate with an example that many of your fellow readers will be familiar with: those nine-digit Social Security numbers without which Americans can’t do

I just read your article Common Table Expressions Ease System Conversion. Instead of changing each SQL statement to add a common table expression, I’d suggest you create permanent views that join the new files. Give the views the same names and the same column names as the original file. Because a view doesn’t have a key, you can have as many views as you want without any performance decrease. A permanent view can also be used for Query/400. In this way queries do not have to be changed.

–Birgitta Hauser

I am always delighted to find mail from Birgitta

Most i5/OS administrators know about setting up automated performance tuning and they also know how to assign individual storage pools to different subsystems. But many people don’t know that they can also tune storage pools for more efficient system processing. This week, I’ll cover some of the finer points of storage pool configuration and how a little extra tuning can make a big difference in memory performance.

Two Ways To Tune Pools

Individual storage pools adjustments can be made by using the green-screen Work with Storage Pools (WRKSHRPOOL) command or by using iSeries Navigator (OpsNav). The key is to tweak