• SQL And Database Shine As Next Tech Refresh Approaches

  February 20, 2017 Dan Burger

  Twelve inches of fresh snow has piled up on your driveway and all you have is a shovel. That’s minimal functionality and, depending on your fitness level, your snow removal performance may be less than desirable. At best, you’re on the low end of the functionality and performance continuum and you’re wishing for better.

  So it is with the DB2 for i database and the programmers who shovel data there. Any help moving data from where it is to where it’s needed will likely be appreciated. Ditto for accelerating application behavior and gaining application functionality.

  This brings us to the …

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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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• Guru: How To Use Global Variables In SQL Scripts

  January 23, 2017 Michael Sansoterra

  Hey, Mike:

  I’m writing SQL scripts to do some administrative work. These scripts are run in iNavigator’s RunSQL scripts utility and use the special CL: directive to execute an IBM i command. I stumbled across the CREATE VARIABLE statement and wondered if I could use an SQL variable to substitute a library name within the OS commands.

  For example, if I define something like the following in iNavigator:

  CREATE OR REPLACE VARIABLE QGPL/LIB CHAR(10) DEFAULT 'JOE';
  

  Can I then use the LIB variable in a CL: command as follows?

  CL:  DSPLIB LIB(LIB) OUTPUT(*PRINT);
  

  –Guru Reader

   

  Unfortunately, GLOBAL VARIABLES cannot …

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• Handling Constraints Revisited

  March 31, 2015 Paul Tuohy

  I recently had an email from Doug, who was making use of some code I had published way back in February 2010 in my article Handling Constraint Violations in RPG. The article discussed how to trap a constraint violation caused by a WRITE/UPDATE/DELETE operation and, more importantly, how to determine the name of the constraint that caused the violation. Doug had come up with an instance where my code was not working! After going through the usual stages of denial, anger, and some expensive therapy, I read the rest of the email. Doug’s code worked fine with an RPG

  …

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