In my earlier tip, Who Needs ?, I described how to create a custom perspective and I also described one scenario when custom perspectives come in handy. I promised to follow that up with another way to use custom perspectives.

I’m often asked questions such as:

• How do I keep my Outline from disappearing when I’m in full-screen edit?
• How can I see my RPG Indentation view alongside the full-screen editor view of the source member?

Custom perspectives can be used as one answer to both questions.

Of course, when you’re in full-screen edit, you can “peek” at any

Using an identity column is a wonderful way to ensure that each row of a table (record of a physical file) has a unique identifier. It sure beats storing the next batch (invoice, transaction, etc.) number in a data area or a one-record database file. Here are a few things to keep in mind when inserting rows (writing records) into a table that has an identity column.

1. Let the system assign the value to the identity column. You do this by specifying GENERATED ALWAYS or omitting the GENERATED option when you create the table.

create table Sales
  ( ID                

One of the easiest ways to improve IBM i performance is to make sure all your critical files are reorganized on a regular basis. Files with excessive deleted records take longer to read because each returned record block contains deleted as well as active records. The next two columns, I’ll present a template for detecting and reorganizing your most active files to improve disk processing efficiency.

Why We Reorg

There are several good reasons for reorganizing files with large numbers of deleted records, including:

1. Conserving disk space–If your disk is filling up, you can retrieve a fair amount