• When IBM i RGZPFM Doesn’t Want To Rebuild Access Paths

  July 30, 2014 Hey, Joe

  I’m trying to run this Reorganize Physical File (RGZPFM) command to reorganize one of my files while it’s active: RGZPFM FILE(lib_name/file_name) MBR(member_name) RBDACCPTH(*OPTIMIZE) ALWCANCEL(*YES) LOCK(*SHRUPD) But I keep getting this CPF3135 error: CPF3135 - Access path for member &2 already in use. This is not what I anticipated. Am I doing something wrong? –Alan My guess is that your RGZPFM command will complete correctly if you run the command using these parameters: RGZPFM FILE(lib_name/file_name) MBR(member_name) RBDACCPTH(*NO) ALWCANCEL(*YES) LOCK(*SHRUPD) The difference between this command and your command is that the Rebuild Access Paths

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• How Do I De-Edit? Let Me Count The Ways

  July 30, 2014 Ted Holt

  I’m sure that you, the professional that you are, are expert in the process of editing numbers. Unlike me, you may even have memorized the edit codes we often use in RPG and DDS source code. Editing is important because it makes life easier for the folks who use the software we produce. But do you know how to de-edit? These days data comes from many sources, and the people who send us this data (or from whom we glean it) don’t always give it to us in tidy packages. Converting such data to a usable format can be challenging,

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• Decisions, Decisions: Templates Or Snippets?

  July 30, 2014 Susan Gantner

  All you RSE (a.k.a., RDi, RDP, WDSC) users out there: Do you prefer templates or snippets? For some of you, the response may be “What’s a Template?” Or “What’s a Snippet?” For those readers, I’ll direct you to first learn more about the basics of both topics via earlier tips from Paul Tuohy, when he wrote about creating templates and creating snippets. If your answer to my original question about templates vs. snippets is “Yes” (meaning you like both), perhaps you don’t need to read the rest of this tip. As with several capabilities of the Rational toolset, these

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• Porting A User Profile From One IBM i Machine To Another

  July 23, 2014 Hey, Joe

  We’re consolidating our IBM i partitions on another Power 7+ machine that belongs to my parent company. They want to move and install some special-purpose user profiles from of their partitions to one of our partitions. What’s the best way to port a user profile from one partition to another? –Tim You have two choices here. 1) You can either take a printout of the user profiles in question and manually recreate them on your target machine; or 2) You can back up and restore the user profiles from one machine to another. My preference is to back up and

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• Beefing Up The Job Log

  July 23, 2014 Ted Holt

  Next to Barbara Morris, the job log is the IBM i professional’s best friend. However, even though job logs give useful information, they don’t always tell us everything we need to know to diagnose job failure. A recent email from perspicacious reader Daniel Long reminded me that sometimes we have to help ourselves. A job log can tell us when a job started and ended, the list of libraries at its disposal, the CL commands and programs it ran, the messages those programs sent, etc. The one thing the job log does not show us, and how I

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• DB2 for i 7.2 Features And Fun: Part 2

  July 23, 2014 Michael Sansoterra

  In the first tip of this series, I covered three new features introduced in DB2 for i 7.2: ALTER TRIGGER, TRUNCATE TABLE, and the ability to vary the fractional precision of a TIMESTAMP column. This tip continues the adventure by exploring a few more new features in IBM i 7.2 (in no particular order). KEEP IN MEMORY Clause For Tables And Index When creating a new index or table, a new KEEP IN MEMORY clause is available to tell DB2 to keep the data in main storage when possible. (A table or index cached in this manner should, of

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• Admin Alerts: Old IBM i Backups, New Tricks

  July 9, 2014 Joe Hertvik

  If you’re like most IBM i administrators, your backup routine is probably set in stone and you don’t really need to change it all that much. It’s solid and it works. But sometimes things happen and you may need to tweak your backup to accommodate new situations or needs. This week, let’s look at three different scenarios where you might have to change or modify your backup solution. Our Backup Scenarios Here are three different backup situations you may encounter that could force you to make some small but significant changes to your backup routines. Developing a new IBM i

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• Advantageous Options

  July 9, 2014 Ted Holt

  It happens to all of us. Someone tells us he needs a program just like an existing one, but with one small change. We clone the program, modify the clone, and now instead of one program to maintain when business requirements change, we have two. Before we know it, we have eight or 10 or more. Fortunately, there is a simple but seldom-used technique we can often use to avoid cloning programs. The technique to which I refer is to use an option parameter. An option parameter controls the behavior of a program. Contrast option parameters to data parameters, which

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• The Geezer’s Guide To Free-Form RPG, Part 4: Prototypes and Procedure Interfaces

  July 9, 2014 Jon Paris

  As promised in Part 3 of this Geezer’s Guide, this time I am going to be looking at the new support for prototypes and procedure interfaces. There are not a large number of enhancements in this area. Mostly they consist of improvements in the compiler’s use of defaults. Of course they also inherit all of the data definition enhancements in areas such as data type and length. Prototypes Let’s start with prototypes and see how they have changed. The basic building blocks are dcl-pr and dcl-parm. As with dcl-subf in data structures, the dcl-parm is optional and only needed when

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• DB2 for i 7.2 Features and Fun, Part 1

  June 30, 2014 Michael Sansoterra

  The dump truck of database features driven by IBM is delivering yet again, unloading a full load of great enhancements for the beloved DB2 for i RDBMS. In addition to the new features included in the various IBM i 7.1 technology refresh (TR) releases, 7.2 has even more security, developer, and administrative friendly enhancements that I’ll be discussing in this and future tips. TRUNCATE TABLE The TRUNCATE TABLE statement is used for deleting all of the rows in a table in one fell swoop. You can think of this statement as SQL’s version of the Clear Physical File Member (CLRPFM)

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