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

Everyone knows that DB2 for i SQL doesn’t play well with legacy multi-member database files. The CREATE ALIAS statement allows SQL to access a particular member of a file. But what if you want to access all members in a file using SQL as though they were a single member? A reader recently inquired about this topic and further wanted to know if there was a built-in SQL function to return each row’s member name.

NOTE: For clarification, I’m not discussing members of a DB2 partitioned table.

Here

CL cannot write to printer files. This is understandable, since CL fits into the category of job control languages. Even though I’d never use CL to build an aged receivables report, there are times when it is advantageous for a CL program to generate a report (i.e., produce a spooled file), and here are two fairly easy ways to do that.

Suppose you have a CL program that runs three RPG programs in nightly batch processing. There are people in your organization who need to know whether these programs ran successfully or not. If you could build a short spooled

The Run SQL Statements (RUNSQLSTM) command executes a file of SQL and/or CL commands. If you’ve used this command, you probably know that RUNSQLSTM reads the commands from a source physical file member. But did you know that there are two other places from which it can read SQL commands?

First, the usual way. Here’s member LOADPLANTS in source physical file SCRIPTS.

CREATE TABLE PLANTS (ID DEC(3), LOCATION VARCHAR(24),
   PRIMARY KEY (ID));
INSERT INTO PLANTS VALUES
(  1,  'Lost Angeles'),
(  2,  'New Yolk'),
(  3,  'Waste Virginia');

To create the PLANTS table and initialize it with data, do this: