Pipes are a fantastic invention as they are useful for conveying a substance in an efficient and well directed manner. Whether used for transporting sewage, carrying oil, or even bottling a duck (if you’re old enough to remember “The High and the Flighty” Foghorn Leghorn cartoon featuring the Ace Novelty company’s “Pipe Full of Fun Kit #7”); our world wouldn’t be the same without them.

Not to be left out, starting in IBM i 7.1 TR9 and IBM i 7.2 TR1, DB2 for i now offers a “PIPE” statement that is used to quickly populate rows in a user-defined table

I am trying to use your FMTDATE SQL function but the system tells me it can’t find it. I know FMTDATE is there. Can you help?

–Robert

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

I’ve received a compliment or two (at least) for the FMTDATE (format date) function I published back in 2009. (Can it really have been so long? How time flies!) I use it heavily, and I’m not the only one. If you’re not familiar with FMTDATE, please read Formatting Dates with SQL before continuing.

To address Robert’s question, the reason the system

Recently I came across a scenario for a customer where I was asked, “How do we interact with our existing DDS-based, composite key, database tables?” That’s going to be a very common trait of most all IBM i shops using Ruby, and this article will cover some common situations you will come across as you use Ruby to interact with existing DB2 for i tables.

First things first, let’s lay out two tables defined with DDS, as shown below. Note how the ORDDTL table has a composite key. The ibm_db Gem follows the ActiveRecord pattern and that pattern expects surrogate