No matter who you are, there’s always something you can learn. In Much Ado about Nothing: Interesting Facts about Null, I presented a good bit of information about null values in database tables. Imagine my surprise and delight to stumble upon something I did not know about nulls.

It started innocently enough. I was surfing the Web and happened upon a link to an article entitled Ten Common SQL Programming Mistakes. I couldn’t click the link fast enough.

I found a very well-written article by Plamen Ratchev. I won’t repeat the whole thing here, but Ratchev wrote about

Sometimes I find out that something useful has been available to me for a long time, but I didn’t know about it. Then I feel like a moron. Today I’m telling you that a certain DB2 for i feature has been around for decades, and you’re probably not using it. However, there’s no need to feel like a moron.

The feature of which I speak is the database ALIAS. As you well know, DB2 for i, in its native architecture, permits database column (field) names of up to 10 characters. That’s certainly better than the six-character limit for identifiers in

We need to put one of our i partitions in restricted state where no applications are running. However, we also need TCP/IP to be up while the system is down, so that we can download PTFs and some software upgrades while our third-party packages aren’t in use. Is there a way to put our system in a semi-restricted state where we can only use our system console and TCP/IP communications?

–Mike

Yes, there is. And it’s relatively easy to accomplish. Here’s the drill.

First, make sure all your users are off the system. Then, make sure that all your batch