It happens at every conference I speak at. Over a cup of coffee (or other liquid refreshment) someone will ask me about my development environment.

• How many libraries do you use?
• Where do you keep source–especially for service programs?
• How do you manage binder language?

So, if for no other reason than allowing me to answer with: “you can read about it at IT Jungle,” here is a description of my current development environment for a little System i Developer application I’m working on.

But First

Of course, your development environment may well be dictated by a change management system.

Everybody above the age of 8 knows that division by zero is a no-no, or at least they should. Everybody who’s used SQL for any amount of time knows that we can use a CASE expression to prevent division by zero. But do you know the other way to prevent division by zero in SQL?

Assume a database file called SomeTable, with fields called Quantity and Amount. Let’s divide Amount by Quantity. First, here’s the usual case statement.

select itnbr, Amount, Quantity,
       case when Quantity <> 0
               then Amount / Quantity
            else 0 end
  from SomeTable

If Quantity is not

Last issue, I began discussing a Power i/Power 6 upgrade that was recently completed in my shop. This review served as a case study for discussing some techniques and pitfalls in bringing up new hardware. I’m offering this examination to document some lessons I learned while upgrading in order to help other i/OS administrators who are installing new hardware. This week, let’s continue the story.

I previously documented how we started swapping out an existing production System i/Power 5 machine for an upgraded model 8204 IBM i Power 6 box with 96 Gb of memory and 4 processors. Over