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Ted Holt

Ted Holt is the senior technical editor at The Four Hundred and editor of the former Four Hundred Guru newsletter at Guild Companies. Holt is Senior Software Developer with Profound Logic, a maker of application development tools for the IBM i platform, and contributes to the development of new and existing products with a team that includes fellow IBM i luminaries Scott Klement and Brian May. In addition to developing products, Holt supports Profound Logic with customer training and technical documentation.

  • Guru: Odds and Ends

    August 16, 2021 Ted Holt

    I really appreciate the comments that readers add to the end of articles or send to me in email. The more you share, the more all of us are better off. I know that you don’t have time to go back through articles we have published to see if anyone has commented, so this week I do that for you. Please keep the feedback coming!

    Several people posted responses to Paul Tuohy’s article Getting Meaningful Audit Information from a Journal. You can read them for yourself, but I wanted to thank Emanuele, who mentioned a tool that is similar …

    Read more
  • Guru: The Deception of Fractional Labeled Durations

    August 9, 2021 Ted Holt

    Hey, Ted:

    We measure certain processes in tenths of an hour. For whatever reason, we cannot make date/time arithmetic work properly when dealing with this data. There must be something that we don’t understand — what we’re doing seems simple and straightforward. Can you help?

    — One Confused Reader

    What this reader wants to do makes perfect sense. He wants to take a value like 8:00 AM, add a fractional number of hours to it, let’s say 1.1, and come up with 9:06 AM. Let’s try an example.

    declare global temporary table StampData
     ( Stamp   timestamp );
        
    insert into session.StampData 
    …

    Read more
  • Guru: Elapsed Time For Human Beings

    August 2, 2021 Ted Holt

    Quick! Think of a weird animal! Perhaps you thought of the platypus, a duck-billed mammal that lays eggs. Maybe Dr. Doolittle’s pushmi-pullyu jumped to mind. Maybe you thought of a politician or a musician or your next-door neighbor. I know a weird animal that you probably didn’t think of.

    The weird animal I have in mind is called the duration. This animal is found in SQL queries. There are three species: timestamp, date, and time. Today I write about the challenges of interacting with this strange entity. I’ll use the timestamp duration as an example. Interacting with date …

    Read more
  • Guru: One-Shot Requests and Quoted Column Names

    July 19, 2021 Ted Holt

    If I had a dollar for every time someone has asked me to query data for them over the years, I could have retired already. (I did not say I would have, but that I could have.) It’s nice when the users can retrieve the information they need to do their jobs without help from IT, but when a request is too complex for them, I’m always glad to help.

    I’ve used many tools over the years for one-shot requests for raw data. These days my tool of choice is the Run SQL Scripts tool, which is part of IBM …

    Read more
  • Guru: Use SQL To Replace Reports

    June 14, 2021 Ted Holt

    Does anybody write report programs anymore? If so, why? Reports are so twentieth-century. The people we serve want spreadsheets, Web pages, cell-phone apps and other modern conveniences. What we need is an easy way to make our report programs write the same information to modern interfaces without having to perform major surgery on them.

    Some 10 years or so ago, I built a scripting language to enable me to reformat spooled files into stream files in CSV format. I called my utility BASS. It was, and continues to be, a successful project.

    But BASS is not the only way …

    Read more
  • Guru: Date Format Confusion

    May 10, 2021 Ted Holt

    Hey, Ted:

    I use the Copy to Import File (CPYTOIMPF) command to build a CSV file to be sent to a MySQL system. My colleagues are unable to import the file because of the format of a timestamp field. CPYTOIMPF puts a hyphen between the date and time (e.g. 2021-05-10-04.36.24.849555), but the other system wants a space between them. Other than writing a custom program do you know of another way to change the format of the timestamp output?

    — Richard

    You won’t need a custom program, Richard. There’s another way to handle this requirement.

    IBM has already very thoughtfully …

    Read more
  • Guru: Compare Pieces Of Source Members

    April 19, 2021 Ted Holt

    Next to Barbara Morris, the F15 key seems to be the RPG programmer’s best friend. I do not like duplicated source code, but for years I have been finding it everywhere. Sometimes I find the same source code in multiple source members. Sometimes I find the same source code two or more times in a single source member. If you’ve been programming in an IBM i shop for more than two hours, you know what I’m talking about.

    As I wrote three years ago in this august publication, duplicated source code is bad because it embodies the WET principle, …

    Read more
  • Guru: Stub Testing And SQL

    March 29, 2021 Ted Holt

    A stub program is a program that does nothing but stand in as a place holder for a real program, which may or may not exist yet. I have used them for years to help me test program changes. There are also stub subroutines, stub subprocedures, etc. What I want to talk about today is how to use a similar concept for SQL queries.

    You can use your favorite search engine to learn about stubs, but I’ll give you an example to increase the chances that you’ll know what I’m talking about. Let’s say that I am modifying a CL …

    Read more
  • Guru: QCMDEXC Makes A Good CPP

    March 22, 2021 Ted Holt

    I’m a fairly decent typist, and chances are you are, too. A person doesn’t sit at a keyboard for decades and not improve. At the same time, I don’t get paid to type, and I do everything I can to reduce the number of keystrokes I have to produce while carrying out the duties of the job.

    If you find yourself keying the same old long commands over and over — and who doesn’t? — I’ve got a tip for you. I have an easy way to reduce long commands to just a few keystrokes. Maybe it will save you …

    Read more
  • Guru: SELECT INTO And Arrays

    March 8, 2021 Ted Holt

    I got egg on my face again. I told a couple of colleagues that they could use the SELECT INTO statement to load multiple rows into an array data structure in an RPG program. Boy, was I wrong! I had confused SELECT INTO with the FETCH statement, of course, which retrieves data over which a cursor has been declared.

    But the matter continued to nag me. I much like the simplicity of SELECT INTO. There’s no cursor to declare, open, fetch from and close, the same reason I like the FOR loop in SQL PL. It seemed (and continues …

    Read more

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