The IBM i 7.2 TR3 and 7.1 TR11 technology refreshes come with a glut of new services. If you are responsible for IBM i administration, you are guaranteed to be tickled pink with these great enhancements. My examples are to call general attention to the availability of these services and give ideas on how they may be used. However, I still recommend going to the IBM documentation on the DeveloperWorks site (or the IBM knowledge center) to get full information on the parameters and all columns used by these special views and table functions.

For clarification, there are actually

If you program in RPG or C, you should know how to use compiler directives to enable or disable source code at compile time. IBM i programmers should also know how to enable or disable executable code at run time, and why they would want to do such a thing.

Let’s talk about the why first.

One good reason to enable or disable code is for trouble-shooting. You might find it valuable to include commands to:

• Display the job log
• Dump program variables
• Copy QTEMP files to another library
• Build spooled files (like of the type I showed how to

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

In this group of three articles, I will discuss a technique for refacing a traditional DDS defined database as an SQL DDL defined database. There will be no recreation of files or recompilation of programs, and it is not as much hard work as you think it might be.

The stored procedures, functions, programs, and commands used in these articles are available in the library SQLFACE, which can be downloaded here.

Before I get into the nitty gritty of refacing databases, I would just like to say