In my previous tip I explained adopted authority and admonished developers to use it wisely. This tip identifies some rules of thumb you should bear in mind when contemplating the use of adopted authority.

User profile to adopt: If you’re not used to using adopted authority in your applications, one of the first questions that comes to mind might be “which user profile should I adopt?” The most straightforward way to use adopted authority is to adopt the authority of the owner of the objects used by the application.

Rule: Create a user profile with ENABLED *NO, PWD *NONE, Initial

Faithful reader Bill Cisne sent me an email with an SQL SELECT query. No comment, no explanation, just code. Bill had figured out how to use a lateral join to solve a problem and was kind enough to share his success with me. I have been aware of lateral joins for some time, but have not found a need for them in my work. Today I revisit a problem to illustrate one way that lateral joins can be useful.

LATERAL is a type of for-each loop within a query. For each row that a SELECT statement (the “outer” query) returns,

Hey, FHG:

We have never used encryption. Our new manager wants us to start using it on our IBM i 7.1 system. (For instance, we store passwords for our website members). I use the ENCRYPT_AES and DECRYPT_CHAR SQL functions in my RPG programs. However, with respect to AES encryption, our PHP web programmer is asking about how to generate an initialization vector and then save it later for decryption. Can you point us in the right direction? Finally, our manager doesn’t like the fact that the encryption key is in plain text in RPG source code. What are your