Subprocedures have been with us since V3R2/V3R6 and have had a major impact on the way that we build applications. Or at least they should have done. Sadly, many RPGers remain firmly rooted in the past.

Those of you who do make regular use of subprocedures have undoubtedly found yourself wishing from time to time that you could define files within them rather than having to resort to accessing globally defined files. With the advent of the 6.1 release of the IBM i operating system, your wishes were granted. Files can indeed now be defined within subprocedures.

The sample subprocedure

Dear Esteemed and Highly Competent Professional,

From time to time, I need to retrieve one row (record) to represent a group of rows that share similar characteristics. It’s a good technique, one that I’d like to share with the readers of this unpretentious publication.

Assume a table (physical file) of sales order details. Each row represents a line of a customer order. Some customers submit an entire order at the same time, but others prefer to keep one order open with us, adding new lines to the order as needed. Here are the columns (fields) of the sales order detail

Last week, my shop replaced an existing production System i 550 machine with an upgraded Power 6 system. Our plan was to switch production processing to our Capacity BackUp (CBU) machine, configure the new machine, and then switch back. This week and next, I’ll review our installation as a mini-case study and discuss what lessons it can provide to other i/OS system administrators.

The Plan

At upgrade time, our System i/Power i configuration consisted of the following components:

1. A System i 550 Power 5 machine equipped with 32 Gb of memory, three processors, and two partitions: a production partition and

In a couple of past tips, I’ve been exploring aspects about using MySQL on i and especially the ability to use the DB2 for i Storage Engine to make the MySQL data accessible from “native” DB2-based applications and tools. In this tip, I’ll cover a couple of questions that often arise related to this topic.

How does database object security work with MySQL and the DB2 for i storage engine?

MySQL has its own security implementation that governs how users may access data. Users and their authorities to databases and tables are set up in MySQL and are unrelated to

I saw the tip Another Super-Easy Way to Copy a Spooled File from One Machine to Another and wanted to add to the discussion.

In our shop, we have one machine with two partitions–one for production, one for testing and development. On the production system, we have a TEST outq. On the test system, we have a PROD outq. Sending spooled files from one machine to the other is a simple matter of using the CHGSPLF command (option 2 from panels that display spool files) to change the outq name. The CL we used to create the output queues is

In your article on IPLing for system performance, you stated that it’s difficult to find a definitive listing of all the steps that i/OS performs during an IPL. Here’s a link to an older list of IPL status progress codes. While it’s not the most up-to-date list, it should give you a good idea of what’s happening during an IPL.

–Dave Flint

Thanks, Dave. The only problem I saw with your link was that it only references the C6xx xxxx IPL status codes, which only tells part of the IPL status code story. Many IPL status codes