When There’s No Room for Special Values

September 21, 2005 Ted Holt

It’s trivia time, esteemed colleagues. The LEN parameter of the PARM command, used to define parameters in CL commands, will accept up to three values. Character data types need one value in the LEN parameter. Decimal values accept one or two. (If only one is specified, the decimal variable is assumed to have zero decimal positions.) What data type allows you to specify three values in the LEN parameter?

You may use three values with the *X data type. This type is supposed to be used with IBM commands, but I don’t know of any reason we mortals can’t use

Odd Ways to Round Numbers

September 21, 2005 Hey, Ted

SQL’s ROUND function allows me to round to the nearest whole number. How can I round to the nearest half?

–Chad

The ROUND function accepts two arguments–a number to be rounded and the number of decimal positions to round to. If the second argument is zero, the first argument is rounded to a whole number. If the second argument is positive, the number is rounded right of the decimal point (i.e., to tenths, hundredths, thousandths, etc). If the second argument is negative, the first number is rounded left of the decimal point (to tens, hundreds, thousands, etc).

The following example

Admin Alert: A Checklist for Creating OS/400 User Profiles, Part II

September 21, 2005 Joe Hertvik

In the Admin Alert from last week, I presented a checklist of questions to ask when you are creating a basic OS/400 user profile. This week, I am expanding that checklist to include additional questions for configuring a user profile to run application programs. Using both checklists, you can confidently set up a user profile that is uniquely configured to run existing applications on your system.

OS/400 provides two ways to create user profiles. You can use the green-screen Create User Profile command (CRTUSRPRF) or you can use the iSeries Operations Navigator (OpsNav) user profile function. For this checklist, I’ll