• Guru: SQL Functions Can Do Non-function Things

  January 27, 2020 Ted Holt

  We all know that the SQL SELECT statement only retrieves data, right? If you want to modify data, you have to use INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, or MERGE, correct? Well, to quote the great George Gershwin, It Ain’t Necessarily So. You can modify data from a SELECT statement, and maybe sometimes you should. Here’s how it’s done.

  I’ll illustrate with a SELECT statement that will run the Reorganize Physical File (RGZPFM) command over physical files that have at least 10 percent deleted records. I could do this with plain ol’ CL, of course, and that’s probably the approach I would …

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• Industry Speaks: IBM i Predictions for 2020, Part 1

  January 20, 2020 Alex Woodie

  We are three weeks into 2020, and that New Year smell hasn’t worn off yet. As time rolls on, the IBM i community will certainly get down to business. In the meantime, here are industry predictions from nine community members to read.

  For Alan Seiden, the CEO of Seiden Group and an IBM Champion for Power, risk management will be a common theme for how they approach IT staffing in 2020.

  “IBM i shops have traditionally operated in a lean manner, relying on key individuals who knew their systems intimately,” Seiden says. “Now, with IT staff managing more projects than …

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• Update On Migration Of developerWorks Content

  January 15, 2020 Alex Woodie

  On New Year’s Day, IBM fulfilled its promise to turn off the developerWorks Connections website, which hosted technical content posted by members of the IBM i community. But before it hit the “delete” button, Big Blue worked with content owners to migrate the most active content to other websites, to redirect browser traffic, and to archive the rest.

  IBM made good on its previous promise to ensure that no content was left behind when it permanently shuttered the popular developerWorks Connections website. It was forced to make that promise after it caused an uproar in October, when it announced that …

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• Guru: Formatting Numbers and Dates/Times/Timestamps in SQL

  January 13, 2020 Paul Tuohy

  In this article, I want to share with you an SQL scalar function that I happen to have been using quite a bit recently. At times, when using an SQL select statement, you may want to format a number or date. Something along the same lines as using the %EDITC or %EDITW built in functions in RPG or the EDTCDE or EDTWRD keywords in DDS. In SQL we can use the VARCHAR_FORMAT or TO_CHAR (they are synonyms for each other – both work exactly the same way) scalar function to provide similar functionality.

  Since they are synonyms for each other, …

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• Guru Classic: Don’t Ignore the View

  January 8, 2020 Paul Tuohy

  Author’s Note: This article was originally published in April 2009. The use of DDL and embedded SQL have come a long way since then but the basic premise of the article still applies. I have removed the embedded SQL example using a SELECT * since this is a style that I no longer recommend (from the point of view of self-documenting code, possible performance gains and breaking old habits of thinking in records). I also changed the example of reformatting a numeric date column to use a DATES table as opposed to functions (a faster and better approach). I removed …

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• 2019: An IBM i Year To Review

  December 16, 2019 Alex Woodie

  And. . . stop! Put down your pencils, class. The test is over. We have made it through another year. Well, okay, we have almost made it through most of this year. But with just two weeks left, now is the time to wrap it all up and revisit the biggest IBM i stories to make news in the year that was 2019.

  It all started back in January, when…

  IBM jacked up the prices on IBM Lab Services engagements by more than 10 percent. Whereas it used to cost $3,125 per day to have the benefit of an IBM …

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• The (More) Modern RPG Language

  December 16, 2019 Bob Cozzi

  Back in 1988, I wrote what became the book on RPG III. Then in 1996, I published the RPG IV version and updated it again circa 2000. But in the years that followed, RPG IV became mostly stale; a tweak here and there, but nothing too spectacular.

  In recent years, a wave of RPG IV enhances has been revealed, most notably free-format was completed and helped propel RPG IV, once again into a truly modern language. Although the measure of “modern” for RPG IV seems to lean toward how much free-format syntax is supported; which is ironic considering COBOL and …

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• Guru: More End Of Year Feedback

  December 9, 2019 Ted Holt

  You are busy. The people you serve need you to do more than one human being can do. You don’t have time to look for comments or updates to the articles we run in this august publication or any other. For this reason, I was pleased to publish some of your feedback in last week’s issue. This week I am pleased to share a bit more.

  In response to Guru: MERGE, Chicken, and Eggs, John asked a good question and made a good point:

  How is using this merge technique under commitment control any different than just doing the …

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• Nagios Solidifies Role in IBM i Monitoring

  December 4, 2019 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that are looking for monitoring solutions would do well to add Nagios to their short list. The open source software has been embraced by IBM i shops, and thanks to a new SQL connector added by IBM with the latest technology refreshes and plans for monitoring the HMC, Nagios connectivity to IBM i is on the upswing.

  Nagios Core is a free, open source software project that’s been adopted by thousands of customers around the world to monitor servers, storage, software, services, networking gear, and anything else that can be connected to the network. The software is …

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• How Infor’s Coleman Strategy Is Evolving, and How IBM i Fits In

  November 20, 2019 Alex Woodie

  It’s been more than two years since Infor unveiled Coleman, the company’s AI platform which became generally available earlier this year. It’s not on the roadmap for IBM i just yet, according to Infor. That may not sound ideal for Infor’s IBM i customers, but it’s not necessarily a bad thing.

  Coleman was unveiled by ERP software giant Infor in 2017 primarily as a digital assistant, which is a fancy way of saying a chatbot. Just as Siri and Alexa can answer questions about the weather or sports, Coleman could answer basic questions about the business, and even handle some …

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