• What’s Wrong With Modern RPG?

  February 27, 2017 Dan Burger

  IBM continues to enhance RPG. If it wasn’t being improved on a regular basis, there would be cause for concern, but some people find cause for concern in everything. Satisfaction is on the other side of the fence, even after they’ve crossed the fence. That’s not an endorsement for “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” There’s always room for constructive criticism and honest assessments of the circumstances.

  That brings us to the RPG enhancements in the recently announced Technology Refresh identified as IBM i 7.2 TR 6 and IBM i 7.3 TR …

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• Why You Should Hire An IBM i Database Engineer

  February 15, 2017 Alex Woodie

  You likely know the IBM i platform as an all-in-one, self-contained bundle of computational glory and efficiency that doesn’t need an army of specialists to run like the platforms from “those other guys” do, thankyouverymuch. While that largely continues to be the case, you may consider making one exception for a certain type of technical expert: the database engineer.

  There’s a growing chorus coming out of IBM Rochester that IBM i shops should consider hiring database engineers, or DBEs. Folks like Alison Butterill, the product offering manager for the IBM i server, DB2 for i Business Architect Scott Forstie, …

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• Like Your Data Access? ProData Gives A Reason To Like It Better

  February 15, 2017 Dan Burger

  It’s crunch time and the IBM i staff is feeling the pressure. It’s time to step up your information retrieval game. In your tool box is the DBU Database Utility. Is this the right tool for your job? It is if your goal is to access data without writing programs. DBU tracks changes (adds and deletes). It also tracks all the views of company data. And it can be accomplished via green-screen, RDi, or Web interfaces.

  The Web interface for DBU Database Utility is called DBU Web. The software, designed and marketed by ProData Computer Services, was introduced in …

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• Guru: SQL PL Labels

  February 13, 2017 Ted Holt

  SQL PL, the powerful, easy-to-learn procedural database language that IBM ships with all versions of DB2, allows you to identify any executable statement or compound statement with a label. I can’t think of a better day than today for us to think about why we might want to do that.

  As a minimalist programmer, I avoid useless code, and that includes unnecessary labels. In the following paragraphs, I will list only the cases that require labels.

  But first, a few ground rules.

  • As with CL, a label name is followed by a colon when used to identify a statement.

  …

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