It’s no secret that many legacy tables in DB2 for i contain fixed-width character columns. If you present this legacy data to users using common tools such as Excel, Access, or even an application data grid control, they’re likely to be annoyed. Why? Because everyone hates fiddling with trailing spaces that are part and parcel of fixed-width columns. If you have a 50-character address column with only 20 characters filled, that leaves 30 annoying trailing spaces to remove.

Here is a picture of this annoying phenomenon shown using the classic QIWS/QCUSTCDT table displayed within an editable Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)

Your tip for building spreadsheets from SQL statements is spot on. The problem I used to have is that people would come back to me days, weeks, or even months later, asking for me to rerun my query to give them current data. I no longer have that problem, and here’s why.

After pasting the SQL data into the first sheet of my Excel file, I copy my SQL command(s) into the second sheet. When the user asks me for a data refresh, I open the spreadsheet and retrieve the SQL. No more time wasted looking through my SQL history.

Think you know everything about i/OS passwords? Here’s a list of six commonly missed aspects of iSeries, System i, and Power i passwords. If you’re a password pro, you may already be aware of three or more of these tips. If not, you may learn something that can help you enhance your i/OS password architecture.

6 Simple Tips for Better Password Management

1. Two system values can prevent your users from using actual words in their passwords–If you want to stop your users from entering passwords that contain complete words that can be easily hacked, try setting on The

A difficult task for developers is to foresee how an application may evolve in the future. As we all know, sometimes the unrealistic becomes reality. Say you have an application that will start on SQL Server and possibly later be moved to DB2 for i or vice versa. How do you create a data-centric application in .NET that isn’t tied to a particular database server? The answer lies in writing “database-agnostic” code.

Let’s back up for a moment to when .NET was in its infancy. When .NET was first released, each ADO.NET database provider had its own set of classes.

My Qshell script would work perfectly if I could make it count correctly. It thinks I have more objects in library QGPL than I really do have. Can you help?

–Hugo

Today is a spectacular day to improve our Qshell skills, thus improving our Unix and Linux shell skills and beefing up our résumés.

Here is Hugo’s Qshell command:

find /qsys.lib/qgpl.lib/ -name '*' | wc -l

The “find” utility produces a list of everything (-name ‘*’) in QGPL. The list is passed along to the “wc” utility, which counts the number of lines (-l) in the list. The problem is

Imagine you’re a flea with one limitation. Whenever you want to go anywhere, you can only jump half the distance to your objective and no further. The second hop halves the remaining distance. The third halves that again, and so on. How long will it take to reach your goal? Administrators dealing with High Availability (HA) and Disaster Recovery (DR) are a lot like that flea.

I thought of the jumping flea after we started revisiting our DR plan. I was feeling pretty smug about things. After all, I have an off-site HA setup for my production Power i machine,