In my last article I introduced you to XMLSERVICE for accessing IBM i data and discussed why you might want to consider using the XMLSERVICE .Net wrapper API to connect to and utilize live IBM i data from your .Net applications. In this article, I will cover an overview of XMLSERVICE and the .Net wrapper API I created for .Net developers to use IBM i data without needing to install IBM i access. You will also get a chance to do your first connectivity test to the IBM i using the XMLSERVICE for .Net API.

Getting Started

For this session

The MIN and MAX functions have been a part of SQL since the beginning. A database-kind-of-guy-or-gal would think that anything so established would be stable to the point of boredom, but a database-kind-of-guy-or-gal would be wrong. MIN and MAX don’t even work the same way in all implementations of SQL, and to top it off, they have a quirk that I come upon occasionally.

MIN and MAX began as aggregate functions. As such, they locate the minimum and maximum non-null values within a column across a set of rows. On this, everyone in the database world is in agreement. The

I was recently presented with an interesting conundrum. Can you generate an INSERT statement for data that currently exists in a table?

For example, let’s say a table contained the following data:

EMPID NAME            GRADE BIRTHDATE  JOINEDDATE SALARY
00001 Test             AA   1956-05-14 2001-10-10  0.00
00002 Test2 - Has Null AA   null       null        null

Could I generate the corresponding insert statement similar to the following:

insert into TESTSTUFF/TESTEMP (EMPID, NAME, GRADE, BIRTHDATE, JOINEDDATE, SALARY) 
values
('00001', 'Test', 'AA', '1956-05-14', '2001-10-10', .00),
('00002', 'Test2 - Has Null', 'AA', NULL, NULL, NULL);

The original request was to generate an insert script for all