One of the frustrating things about being a speaker at conferences is that when you want to attend another session with a topic that peaks your interest, it invariably clashes with when you are speaking. But every now and again, the scheduling gods work in your favor. Such was the case recently, when I was speaking at the excellent International i-Power 2015 conference.

Scott Forstie, IBM‘s DB2 for i business architect, was giving a presentation, “IBM i Services – SQL interfaces into the IBM i operating system.” I had recently done an iTalk with Scott where we had chatted

I deliver a session on the HMC to many user groups, including COMMON. Attendance had been falling, so COMMON’s education team had decided to give the session just one more go. This time though I walked into a packed house, with people carrying in chairs and standing along the walls! “What brings you all here at 8 a.m.?” I asked. “You’re going to talk about updating the HMC, right?” was the response. You see IBM had just announced POWER6 severs, and that mandated newer code on the HMC.

Some of you may wonder what an HMC is, so let’s

The need to retrieve a sample or subset of data from a database is a relatively common (and somewhat annoying) task. For example, DB2 for i developers often want to extract data and create a scaled down copy of a library (a.k.a. schema) to develop with. Additionally, sometimes code testing can be done using random data, such as creating a battery of orders to process with varying customers, order terms, etc. This tip won’t attempt to tackle the full breadth of either of these scenarios. However, the aim is to show how some simple queries can be used to create