Awhile back I was teaching an SQL class in Fargo, North Dakota. During one of the afternoon lab sessions, one of the students asked if he could use the CONCAT function on two numbers, or two numeric columns, without first casting them to character values.

I knew the answer was “No”, and that the numeric values had to be cast to character first before the student concatenated them together. Instead of just giving the student the answer, I played good teacher and I told the student to try it and let me know how it worked.

Imaging my surprise when

Programming languages use two conventions for passing arguments (commonly referred to as parameters) to a called routine. Some languages use positional parameters. That is, the parameters must be passed to the routine in a certain order. The other (and less error-prone) method is to password parameters in keyword format. IBM i allows you to force callers to use keyword format–to a point–when they use your CL commands. Here’s how.

But first, let’s review the two major problems inherent in positional parameters. First, it is easy to get a parameter value into the wrong position. Take the following OCL command for

Working in both public and private companies during my career, I’ve been subjected to my share of IT audits. My impression is that while auditors are usually very savvy about your production environment, there are other issues that maybe they should be looking at but don’t. If your production environment is in tip-top shape, audit-wise, here are some other things you might consider looking at to avoid trouble.

Why Aren’t Auditors More Interested in Development Environment Infrastructure?

Not to give anyone ideas, but I’ve always wondered why auditors don’t investigate development environments as seriously as they audit production environments. After