I’m trying to use a SELECT/INTO embedded SQL statement in an RPG program that accesses a table that includes a BLOB(20K) column. The INTO target is an externally defined data structure based on the table. However, I get compiler errors unless I remove the BLOB column from the table. What’s up with that?

—Four Hundred Guru reader

The problem is that RPG doesn’t have a native data type equivalent of a BLOB (or the other large object types CLOB/DBCLOB, for that matter.) The reason for this is that large object types can be up to 2GB in size, far

In an earlier tip, I began a series on how I do things using RDi that some people seem to prefer doing in PDM. In that first tip, I talked about various ways to copy a source member. In this tip, I’ll talk about compiling with RDi.

I must confess to being baffled by the number of people I talk to who, while they do all their editing in RDi, always go back to PDM to do their compiles. To me, if you don’t compile your code with RDi, you’re missing out on a huge time-saver: the ability to