As much as I like SQL, I realize that it has its shortcomings. Fortunately, SQL’s shortcomings are not hard to work around. In the few paragraphs that follow, I give you a quick and easy way to get around the problem of converting invalid character data to the date data type.

When I first began learning to program, System/34 RPG II was the most common programming language in my area. The S/34 had no database engine and RPG II had no date data type, so we stored dates in numeric and/or alpha fields. (Nowadays, dates are still stored in numeric

My shop keeps running up against the process and data control requirements surrounding the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. We are continually told that we should be actively monitoring all accesses to the critical financial data that reside on our i5 system, as well as the powerful users that may be accessing the data. Of course, the first hurdle to compliance in this area is identifying which files are critical and then managing the users with powerful authorities. However, since there’s already someone in the IT security group breathing down my neck and our company already has a well-defined data classification scheme (rare,

In your article about Setting Up User Profiles Without Passwords, you said that when you set up a user profile to have a password of *NONE, this configuration ” . . . essentially disables a user from performing any type of interactive work on the system.” In my shop, we have implemented Network Authentication Service (NAS), along with Enterprise Identity Mapping (EIM) and a Kerberos server, to create a true Single Sign-On environment. My profile has a password of *NONE and the Kerberos-NAS-EIM configuration handles the authentication to the AS400. I log into a 5250 session multiple times a day