The concept of having a locally maintained application “scratch pad” to keep track of session specific information has been around for quite awhile. RPG applications have long used the LDA (Local Data Area) to track common information meant to be shared between programs within a job. (This saves developers the trouble of passing around all of this common information as parameters.)

Likewise, many operating systems have the concept of an environment variable, which is similarly used to maintain and publish many OS-defined and user-defined values. Under IBM i 7.1, SQL offers something called a global variable, which can be

You may have heard of the new zip file APIs–QZipZip and QZipUnzip–that IBM added to IBM i 7.1. I am looking forward to using them. But if your shop is like mine, that is, you’re not running 7.1, there’s another way to work with zip files, and it does a good job.

The other way is the Java Archive utility, or jar. It’s an easy command to use, and it runs under Qshell. Here’s how it works.

The jar command has several parameters. First is a case-sensitive list of options. You will always need a lowercase “f” option.

Second is

It’s common for Power i users to complain their batch jobs are running too slowly. But is system capability responsible for slow batch throughput or could the problem be caused by poor work management procedures? This week, let’s look at a few scenarios where users say their batch jobs are running too slowly and discuss what, if anything (short of a hardware upgrade), can help speed up batch processing.

Getting To the Bottom of Slow Batch Processing

Users who feel that their batch work isn’t completing in a timely manner may blame that perceived slowness on the system hardware. This