Recently, I have been working on a modernization project with a client. Part of this project has involved me scanning and analyzing a number of legacy programs looking for patterns, commonalities, and such.

In this article, I want to highlight a feature of RSE (Remote System Explorer) that has proved very helpful in the above process: Tasks and Bookmarks.

Tasks and bookmarks provide an easy mechanism for defining tasks and, if required, placing a corresponding “marker” in a source member. In the past, you might have done this by printing off a source listing, highlighting some lines of code with

Today is April 6, 2011. Venus is in Cancer and Mars is in Leukemia. The sun is ascending faster than the U.S. national debt, and descending faster than the value of the U.S. dollar. The moon is a harsh mistress. See what the stars have to say to you today.

Aries (March 21 – April 19): Work to improve the quality of comments in source code. What? is good, but Why? is even more important.

Taurus (April 20 – May 20): Master an unfamiliar feature of SQL today.

Gemini (May 21 – June 20): Instead of cloning a program, consider

Nothing is more ubiquitous in Power i shops than IBM 7014 black racks and Power Distribution Units (PDUs) that house and power most i/OS systems. Starting around $4,000 list for a base rack, most IBM shops routinely buy IBM racks and PDUs because they are standard for a Power i system. But do you realize there’s another option for racking your Power i system that could save you money?

How Much Does That Black Rack Really Cost?

IBM 7014 racks and Power Distribution Units (PDUs) are so common in iSeries, System i, and Power i shops that no one thinks

In my previous article Duplicating CPFY Function Using SQL, I presented three questions that are frequently asked regarding SQL that are interrelated:

1. Can SQL be used to duplicate the function found in the native CPFY (COPY FILE) command?
2. Can SQL be used to duplicate a table similar to the function found in the native CRTDUPOBJ (CREATE DUPLICATE OBJECT) command?
3. Can a field reference file be used as the source for column definitions with the CREATE TABLE SQL statement?

I said the answer to all three questions was a qualified YES and introduced the concept of using the INSERT INTO

I am working on a project using DB2 for i, but my experience is with other database management systems. I can’t find the SQL TRUNCATE TABLE statement. Does DB2 cover this functionality some other way?

–Brad

Even in 7.1, the latest release, IBM does not implement the TRUNCATE TABLE statement. However, since this statement is included in other DB2 products, as well as in Informix, I expect we’ll see it eventually as part of our world.

For the benefit of readers who are not familiar with TRUNCATE TABLE, this statement removes all rows of a table (records of a physical

Last year, I stumbled on a cool method for automatically deleting spooled files. When you create a spooled file, you can set the number of days that you want to keep that file on your system. Then once a night, you can submit a job that runs the Delete Expired Spooled Files (DLTEXPSPLF) command that will automatically delete expired spooled files. You should try it.

–Peter

After working with the Power i and its antecedents for almost 30 years, I always find it interesting when somebody shows me something valuable that I haven’t used before. DLTEXPSPLF is a simple command