Some time ago I read Ted Holt’s Guru tip Sharing Simplifies Source Code in which he showed an approach to building reports in a modular programming environment. At the time I can remember thinking that it would be interesting to see how V6 RPG’s ability to pass files as parameters might offer an even simpler approach.

Simpler, that is, once you know how to pass files as parameters! Well, it has taken me almost a year, but I finally got round to working on it, and I confess I rather like the results.

Ted’s original approach required that a driver

The practice in our shop has been to set the initial size of physical files to what seems to be a reasonable value. In many cases, we leave the size at the default value of 10,000 records with three increments of 1,000 records each. Sometimes we change one or more of these values, usually the first one. Someone has suggested that we stop the guesswork and create all files with SIZE(*NOMAX). However, someone else is afraid that a program will go into a loop and fill up the disk space with output operations. Who’s right?

–Flora

I agree with the

Talking with an IBM Business Partner this week, the conversation turned to PTF management and the best ways for managing cumulative PTFs. Inspired by this talk, I came up with these four simple rules for a good PTF management strategy.

Rule 1: Don’t Let Your PTFs Age

A lot of shops only apply PTFs when they upgrade their hardware, but many (or most) shops are also frequently upgrading their application software. Frequent application changes can create new processing situations that test the limits of a partition’s Licensed Internal Code (LIC) and operating system fixes. In a rapidly changing applications environment,