Thanks to the kindness of Guy Vig and Fernando Hurtado of the International Business Machines Corporation, I have information for you concerning V6R1 CL. For the third straight release, IBM has added solid features to the compiler. Since I use CL heavily, I greatly appreciate the effort. Here’s what you can look forward to when you install V6R1.

Close a File

CL includes a new Close Database File (CLOSE) command that you can use to close a file. This gives you another way to process a file more than once in a CL procedure. As you are no doubt aware,

The Work with Message Descriptions (WRKSMSGD) panel gives me options 2, 4, 5, and 6 to change, delete, display, and print message descriptions. But there is no option to allow me to copy a message description. Such an option would be helpful when I need to create a new message description that is similar to an existing one, or when I copy a message description to another message file. Am I overlooking an easy way to copy message descriptions?

–Ron

To the best of my knowledge, no. (Buddy, I hope I’m wrong on this one.)

Let’s take the second case

I recently wrote a column describing i5/OS features that enable high availability functionality in your shop. This week, I’m narrowing the focus and discussing five benefits you can realize when installing a Capacity BackUp System (CBU) for System i failover in case of disaster. Some of these benefits are to be expected, but others might cause you to rethink your idea of a CBU and what it provides.

What Is a CBU?

As I described in my earlier piece, a CBU is a specially configured System i machine or partition that communicates with your main production box and replicates