The new CREATE OR REPLACE feature of SQL has been most helpful to me. It works for aliases, functions, masks, permissions, procedures, sequences, triggers, variables and views. It would be nice if it worked for tables, especially when I’m developing a new application. Here’s a workaround.

The trick is to use a dynamic compound statement. If you’re not familiar with these, I recommend you read Michael Sansoterra’s excellent article on that subject.

One of the things that dynamic compound statements let you do is include conditional logic, which is what we need. We need a way to drop a table

I’ve seen a particularly sharp increase in the use of RDi (or Rational Developer for i) by RPGers this year. I suspect that has a lot to do with the fact that it contains the only editor that supports the new V7 all-free-format version of the RPG language. Even among shops that are not planning to make use of free form D specs right away, this limitation seems to have made people realize that the writing was on the wall and that SEU’s day had come and gone.

One way that I gauge the interest in RDi is in the

Four Hundred Guru:

I’ve been reading your SQL articles in hopes of finding a solution to a problem. I need to insert the same data into two tables at the same time in detail form to one table and in summary form to the other. Is such a thing possible?

I have an incoming transaction table that I want to insert into another table. The incoming transaction table has multiple columns and some of those columns are quantities (integer) fields or amount (with a decimal) fields. I want SQL to run an INSERT INTO… SELECT FROM type statement to