• The Geezer’s Guide to Free-Form RPG, Part 3: Data Structures and More Data Definitions

  May 28, 2014 Jon Paris

  In my previous tip on the new free-form RPG support I discussed the basics of the new methods for defining data in RPG. In this tip I will be covering some additional aspects of the new style data definitions that are not so obvious from a simple reading of the documentation. More on Data Definitions Until now, if you wanted to ensure that all fields of a specific type (currency for example) used a common definition, you used the LIKE keyword. The one small problem with this was that you could not change the data type of the cloned field.

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• DB2 for i 7.2 Functions, Functions, Functions

  May 28, 2014 Michael Sansoterra

  In this tip about new DB2 for i 7.2 features, I’m going to cover some noteworthy news about user-defined function (UDF) features. The feature list includes how a function name is now resolved based on casting rules, named parameters, parameter defaults and array parameters. Function Name Resolution From the earliest days of V4R4 when user-defined functions became available, I’ve had a BIG pet peeve. That pet peeve is how DB2 tries to figure out what function you want to use. For a little background, remember that a function can be overloaded. That means scalar UDF ConvertDate can be defined

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• The IBM i Journal Cache Sweeper Knob

  May 28, 2014 Joe Hertvik

  After publishing my latest article on improving IBM i journal performance with journal caching, IBM Rochester Software Engineer Chad Olstad wrote in with the following comment, which expands on journal caching and offers an alternate view of journal caching’s relationship with commitment control. “I wanted to point out the one thing you did not mention in the article is the cache sweeper knob, which controls how [old] stale cached journal entries are allowed to be before they are flushed to disk. [The cache sweeper knob] can be customized by the user as of V6R1 via [the Change Journal Attributes

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• Using Built-In Global Variables In DB2 For i 7.2

  May 14, 2014 Michael Sansoterra

  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

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• Interpreting Stream File Timestamps

  May 14, 2014 Ted Holt

  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

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• Admin Alert: When Journaling Slows Down Your System, And What To Do About It

  May 14, 2014 Joe Hertvik

  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

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• Emulate sp_Help In DB2 For i

  April 30, 2014 Michael Sansoterra

  Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here. Every once in a while I get an email from an SQL developer asking something like “What tool do you use to develop SQL routines on IBM i?” Astonished is the perfect verb to describe the reaction when I reply that I normally use STRSQL or Run SQL Scripts (in System i Navigator). Equally apt descriptions are dumbfounded, perplexed, baffled, and flummoxed. If you’ve ever used SQL developer tools on other platforms, such as Microsoft’s SQL Server Management Studio, then the astonishment is quite

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• PDF = Pretty Darn Fine!

  April 30, 2014 Ted Holt

  If you’re running IBM i 6.1 or later, you have a great alternative to spooled files at your disposal–PDF. Here are four easy ways to add PDF generation to your programming. Method 1: Write directly to PDF. You can make your RPG (or COBOL or whatever) programs write directly to PDF stream files. You’ll need to specify the proper values in the Create Printer File (CRTPRTF), Change Printer File (CHGPRTF), or Override with Printer File (OVRPRTF) commands: Device type (DEVTYPE) must be *AFPDS Workstation customizing object (WSCST) must be *PDF To stream file (TOSTMF) must have a valid directory or

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• Where Do I Find These IBM i Licensed Products?

  April 30, 2014 Hey, Joe

  I’m installing third-party software on my IBM i. The vendor documentation lists out the following IBM i licensed programs as pre-requisites for installation. 5722-SS1–OS/400 – Directory Services 5722-JV1–Java Developer Kit 1.5 or higher 5722-AC3–Crypto Access Provider 128-bit for AS/400 I can’t find any of these products in my IBM i licensed program list. How do I make sure I have these features? I’m running i 6.1. –Steve Because of the way IBM does things combined with some changes to the i operating system over the years, there’s some confusion as to where and how each of these products is included

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• The Geezer’s Guide to Free-Form RPG, Part 2: Data Structures and More

  April 16, 2014 Jon Paris

  In the first part of this series I discussed why I thought that RPGers should care about the new free-form support. Since you may have seen other articles on the basics of this support, I thought in this tip I’d focus on a few examples of how existing D-specs are converted to the new format so you can see how it all works. Before we begin though, let’s have a quick review of the basics of this new style of data definition. All definitions begin with a declaration operation code. For D-spec type definitions these take the form dcl-X where

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