With assurance of continued support from IBM, we used VisualAge RPG (VARPG) to develop modern business applications. Then IBM pulled the plug on VARPG. Nevertheless, we’ve kept our applications working, and have even managed to find a way to run them under 64-bit Windows from our LAN. Here’s how we did it.

A Little Background

Around a decade ago, we were looking for a way to put a modern interface on our 5250-based applications. We really liked what VisualAge RPG (VARPG) had to offer. We found many reasons to lean toward this solution, but the most enticing ones were

I’m attempting to use the SQL MERGE statement to write an “upsert” that stores the data to be inserted or updated in an externally described data structure. Is that possible? Any insight into this would be helpful.

–Lewis

Even though Lewis was only dealing with one row in the database table, what he was doing qualifies as an upsert in my book. He’s updating a row if it’s there and adding it if it isn’t. However, I don’t think MERGE is the right tool for this job.

MERGE is designed to update a lot of rows in one table from

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

A common task for database developers is to accept a delimited text file, parse it, and dump it into a database table. This tip demonstrates a user-defined table function (UDTF) that can accomplish this task based on delimited text data stored in a CLOB or in an IFS file.

The UDTF is called ParseFileContent and it accepts three parameters: CLOB data to parse, row delimiter character(s), and column delimiter character(s). The UDTF returns a ROWID column that represents the line number of the text data and 250 columns