The use of SQL within our applications is on the increase. After a shaky start in the early days of the AS/400, SQL has gone from strength to strength with every release of the operating system.

The use of embedded SQL (in RPG) stabilized with V5R1 and really came into its own when free-form SQL was introduced in V5R4 and PTFed back to V5R3.

But with SQL, and embedded SQL especially, there is always that lingering doubt about SQL performance when accessing data. We have all heard horror stories about the lights in the building dimming when a certain program

I just love those BIFs that IBM added to RPG. I can’t understand why anybody would use old RPG op codes instead of the BIFs. But I’ve run into a brick wall with %SUBST. Help!

–Vince

Allow me to explain Vince’s situation. He was assigned to revise a program someone else had written. The program reads a list of the file names in a certain directory on their network, and has to do other processing depending on file name extension (the part of the name following the last period).

Here’s a program similar to the one that Vince had to

After posting my March 21st article on Four Simple Rules for PTF Management, I received so much good information from our readers on PTFs that I decided to pass it along in this follow-up column. Here’s some additional tips and techniques on PTF management that might make it easier to apply PTF fixes on your IBM i machines.

Q: When does IBM refresh a Cume PTF package? A: Never

Reader Richard Shearwood wrote in with this piece of information about whether IBM corrects cumulative PTF packages containing bad PTFs after the package is released.

IBM never refreshed a cume