FHG Volume: 7 Archives - Page 10 of 14

Missing In Action: The Full Outer Join

April 11, 2007 Hey, Ted

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

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Reader Feedback on One-Man System i Shops

April 11, 2007 Hey, Bruce

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

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Admin Alert: The Process and Pitfalls of Duplicating Libraries

April 11, 2007 Joe Hertvik

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

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FTP Means ‘First Try Pinging’

April 4, 2007 Cletus the Codeslinger

File Transfer Protocol, or FTP, was obviously designed by academics. While academics are OK people (after all, my editor, Ted Holt, is a part-time instructor at a community college), they are not familiar with what goes on at the factory (like the one where I work full-time). That means that making FTP (and other Unix-type applications) work dependably in an automated environment can be a challenge. Here’s a tip that can help.

FTP was intended to work this way: a human types a command into a computer. The computer responds. The human types another command. The computer responds. Etc. Etc.

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Improving Upon WDSC’s Table View

April 4, 2007 Jon Paris

Although most WDSC users are familiar with the Table View, few take advantage of all its many features. For those of you unfamiliar with Table View, it is the closest thing in WDSC to the familiar PDM Work With lists. To display the equivalent of a Work With Members list, right click on the source file name to display the context menu and select Show in Table as shown below.

The result is the display shown here:

(Click here to see a larger image)

Unlike the PDM list, options are selected from an item’s context menu. The primary

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Admin Alert: Graphically Moving i5/OS Objects with OpsNav

April 4, 2007 Joe Hertvik

One of the problems with i5 articles (including my own) is that the writers focus on accomplishing i5/OS tasks with 5250 green-screen commands. However, many newer administrators are more comfortable with graphical utilities, and learning command line techniques is not that desirable. To help those users, here is a primer on using IBM’s iSeries Navigator program to perform basic i5 file and library manipulation from a graphical interface.

As you probably know, iSeries Navigator (OpsNav) is IBM’s graphical solution for managing i5, iSeries, and AS/400 machines. Packaged as part of its iSeries Access for Windows product, system operation tasks are

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Two Views on the WDSc Snippets View, Part 1

March 28, 2007 Bruce Guetzkow

Developers usually don’t like to reinvent the wheel. If we or a co-worker have programmed a task in one source member, it is common to copy that code into another source member when a similar task needs to be done. If you are using WebSphere Development Studio Client (WDSc), there is another option: the Snippets View. Code snippets can be saved and easily inserted into any source member with a simple double-click of the mouse.

A First Look

The Snippets View is typically not displayed in the Remote Systems Explorer (RSE) perspective. If you don’t see a tab labeled Snippets,

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The Case of the Missing Outline (View)

March 28, 2007 Jon Paris

One of the most common mistakes made by beginning WDSC users in our on-site classes is to accidentally close the Outline View by clicking on the “X” in the top right hand corner. As those of you who already use WDSC know, Outline view is probably one of the single most valuable features in WDSC, and once you are used to using it, to lose it is a disaster!

So how do you get the window back again? There are two ways–the brute force approach and the more “refined” approach.

The brute force approach is to simply click on Window

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Admin Alert: Five Things that Kill Backups (and What to Do About Them)

March 28, 2007 Joe Hertvik

For system administrators, there isn’t any worse feeling than reaching for a backup tape only to realize that your backup system has failed and you can’t restore a critical file. While you can’t always prevent backup failures, you can monitor for simple things that will alert you to a disruption. To that end, here’s my top five list of i5 backup issues and what you can do about them.

Issue #1: Not changing your backup tapes

With many automated backup routines, you simply put in the backup media and the system does the rest by formatting the media and performing

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iSeries Navigator Job Monitor

March 21, 2007 Bruce Guetzkow

Note: The code accompanying this article can be downloaded here

As the only developer in a small company, I try to find ways to make the computer work so I don’t have to. We don’t have an operator and no one is dedicated to monitoring the QSYSOPR message queue, so when problems happen, I need a way to be notified, wherever I am. I’ve tried a couple of programming solutions that captured information from the WRKACTJOB screen, but there were always conditions that I didn’t anticipate and weren’t captured by those methods.

Then I learned about Monitors in iSeries Navigator

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