FHG Volume: 14 Archives - Page 6 of 9

Admin Alert: When Journaling Slows Down Your System, And What To Do About It

May 14, 2014 Joe Hertvik

One interesting feature of the IBM i operating system is that under certain circumstances, journaling can actually slow down batch job performance. Here’s a real-life case study of how journaling can slow down processing and what tools IBM provides to handle the situation.

When Journaling Attacks

After migrating a production IBM i partition to a new Power 7+ machine from Power 6 hardware, a batch job that previously took five hours to complete was now taking over 11 hours to finish and had to be cancelled each time it ran. This package rebuilt an item table in the company’s ERP

…

Where Do I Find These IBM i Licensed Products?

April 30, 2014 Hey, Joe

I’m installing third-party software on my IBM i. The vendor documentation lists out the following IBM i licensed programs as pre-requisites for installation.

5722-SS1–OS/400 – Directory Services
5722-JV1–Java Developer Kit 1.5 or higher
5722-AC3–Crypto Access Provider 128-bit for AS/400

I can’t find any of these products in my IBM i licensed program list. How do I make sure I have these features? I’m running i 6.1.

–Steve

Because of the way IBM does things combined with some changes to the i operating system over the years, there’s some confusion as to where and how each of these products is included

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PDF = Pretty Darn Fine!

April 30, 2014 Ted Holt

If you’re running IBM i 6.1 or later, you have a great alternative to spooled files at your disposal–PDF. Here are four easy ways to add PDF generation to your programming.

Method 1: Write directly to PDF.

You can make your RPG (or COBOL or whatever) programs write directly to PDF stream files. You’ll need to specify the proper values in the Create Printer File (CRTPRTF), Change Printer File (CHGPRTF), or Override with Printer File (OVRPRTF) commands:

Device type (DEVTYPE) must be *AFPDS
Workstation customizing object (WSCST) must be *PDF
To stream file (TOSTMF) must have a valid directory or

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Emulate sp_Help In DB2 For i

April 30, 2014 Michael Sansoterra

Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here.

Every once in a while I get an email from an SQL developer asking something like “What tool do you use to develop SQL routines on IBM i?” Astonished is the perfect verb to describe the reaction when I reply that I normally use STRSQL or Run SQL Scripts (in System i Navigator).

Equally apt descriptions are dumbfounded, perplexed, baffled, and flummoxed. If youâ€™ve ever used SQL developer tools on other platforms, such as Microsoft’s SQL Server Management Studio, then the astonishment is quite

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Admin Alert: Elements Of An IBM i Incident Management Plan, Part 2

April 16, 2014 Joe Hertvik

Last issue, I started outlining how to set up an IBM i incident management plan, going through four of the seven elements that are crucial for IBM i monitoring and response. This issue, let’s finish up and discuss the final elements an IBM i incident management template should provide.

The Elements Of IBM i Incident Management, Revisited

As presented last time, here are the critical elements every IBM i incident management plan should include.

What type of monitoring are you doing: Manual, automatic, or hybrid?
What are you monitoring for?
Call trees: Who should be alerted when a problem

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Here’s Help For A Huge Hardship

April 16, 2014 Ted Holt

Multimillion-row tables are more and more common in IBM i shops these days. Querying those monsters can be a strain on the system. Fortunately, IBM gave us some help in DB2 for i 7.1.

The help comes in the form of a new wrinkle in indexing. The smart people who produce the world’s greatest relational database management system found a way to store aggregate (summary) information in encoded vector indexes. Here’s an example.

Assume a table (physical file) of sales history, such as this one:

create table Sales
  ( ID                integer as identity,
    Invoice           dec  (9,0),
    Line              dec  (3,0),
    InvoiceDate

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The Geezer’s Guide to Free-Form RPG, Part 2: Data Structures and More

April 16, 2014 Jon Paris

In the first part of this series I discussed why I thought that RPGers should care about the new free-form support. Since you may have seen other articles on the basics of this support, I thought in this tip I’d focus on a few examples of how existing D-specs are converted to the new format so you can see how it all works.

Before we begin though, let’s have a quick review of the basics of this new style of data definition.

All definitions begin with a declaration operation code. For D-spec type definitions these take the form dcl-X where

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Embedded SQL Exception/Error Handling

April 2, 2014 Paul Tuohy

At times, I wish embedded SQL would act more like RPG. A case in point is with exception/error handling.

Embedded SQL assumes you are using SQLCODE or SQLSTATE to check whether or not each statement worked. In RPG, the equivalent would be have an E extender on every file operation code and checking the %error() after the operation code.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could get embedded SQL to cause the program to fail if it gets an unexpected error–just like RPG? Well, you can, just by adding one line of code after each SQL statement.

Figure 1 shows

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Search Source Members For Two Or More Strings

April 2, 2014 Hey, Ted

I have used option 25 of the Work with Members Using PDM (WRKMBRPDM) for years to look for character strings in source physical file members. Is there a way to search for two or more strings at once?

–T.

It’s not possible with that option. You might want to use option -e of Qshell’s grep utility.

Let’s say you want to find all instances of invnbr and invoicenumber in source physical file SRC in library TST. Here’s the command you would need to use:

$
grep -in -e 'invnbr
>
invoicenumber
>
'  /qsys.lib/tst.lib/src.file/*

The first, third, and fifth lines

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Admin Alert: Elements Of An IBM i Incident Management Plan, Part 1

April 2, 2014 Joe Hertvik

How do you react when there’s an issue with your IBM i partition? This isn’t an easy question as IBM i incidents can involve many different areas, including networking/infrastructure, applications, storage, performance, and third-party vendors. This issue and next, I’ll outline the critical elements of an IBM i incident management plan and how it helps you quickly determine what to do and who to call when problems come up.

The Elements Of IBM i Incident Management

Here are the critical elements I believe every IBM i incident management plan should include.