As far as I know, you haven’t covered my situation in Four Hundred Guru. I need to join two physical files using SQL. It’s possible that some records in the first file won’t have matches in the second file. It’s also possible that some records in the second file won’t have matches in the first file. What type of join do I use?

–Chris

You need a full outer join, Chris, and DB2/400 (or whatever they call it these days) won’t handle it–yet. I expect IBM to add the full outer join any release now.

To simulate the full

I read your recent article about using OpsNav to monitor jobs. What caught my eye was your lead line about being a one man shop. I didn’t think there were too many of us left! Anyway I just wanted to bounce some ideas off someone.

The first being, how do I decide what kind of RPG modernization product I should be looking at. LANSA, Profound Logic, BCD, CGIDEV2–there are so many out there, what do I choose? (Well, there is also WebSphere, but I have not heard great things about it.) Or should I be looking at

Last fall, I wrote a column discussing the pitfalls of duplicating files to a test library. However copying files and logicals between environments is just the tip of the iceberg. There is an entirely different set of issues involved when you are trying to duplicate an entire library for test purposes. To that end, here’s my procedural checklist for making an (almost) exact copy of any native i5/OS library.

Why We Copy

There are many reasons for copying i5/OS libraries, but the most common needs are to create or refresh a test environment with production data, to use an