FHG Volume: 7 Archives - Page 7 of 14

PHP on i5/OS: A Whole New Stack

June 27, 2007 Erwin Earley

Development and deployment of Web-based applications is one of the most common activities in today’s IT world. For development of Web applications a development stack, consisting of an operating system platform, Web server, database engine, and scripting language is often employed. With the advent of PHP on i5/OS V5R4 and OS/400 V5R3, iSeries and System i customers have a whole new way to skin the Web cat while keeping their favored back-end system right in the thick of things.

One of the most popular of these stacks is the LAMP stack, which stands for Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. Since

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Performance of Function Subprocedures

June 27, 2007 Ted Holt

Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here.

Last week, I wrote about performance issues when parameters are passed to subprocedures. This week, I write about a similar matter. If a subprocedure returns a value to the caller (i.e., the subprocedure serves as a function), the computer has to store the returned value somewhere in memory. The fact that the system must allocate memory for returned values means that performance may be affected.

To test the performance of function subprocedures, I wrote two substring functions. The first one, SubString, works like the %SUBST built-in function

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Admin Alert: Meditations on Full System Backups

June 27, 2007 Joe Hertvik

Long-time i5/OS and OS/400 administrators may think they know everything about full system backups (FSBs). However, there are several considerations to think about before performing an FSB, and IBM has recently slipped additional capabilities into the FSB process that you may not know about. So let’s take five minutes and meditate over the whys, whens, and hows of FSBs and how you can improve the backup process in your shop.

Why We FSB

Full system backups are performed as insurance for emergency situations, such as a total system crash or a full system recovery to another machine in the event

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Parameter Passing and Performance

June 20, 2007 Ted Holt

There are three ways to pass a parameter to a procedure: by reference, by value, and by read-only reference. These methods are not interchangeable, and passing parameters by value can have unfavorable effects on performance. In the following paragraphs, I explain why I make such a statement, I show you how to define parameters for performance, I list the performance figures from my testing, and I provide some recommendations for parameter passing.

Before I go any further, let me get a couple of things out of the way. First, keep in mind that I am talking about you and the

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Conditional Counting with Open Query File

June 20, 2007 Hey, Ted

Is there a way to make Open Query File (OPNQRYF) count records that meet certain criteria? I want to write a summary query, using OPNQRYF, that counts all records, and that also counts only the records that have a positive value in one of the numeric fields. Can OPNQRYF do anything like that?

–Dave

When I got Dave’s question, I told him that I thought it could be done, but I’d have to play with it to figure it out. A little while later, Dave had his query and I had another technique to share with you.

It would be

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What Is SMIOSTCPGT and Why Is It Eating My System?

June 20, 2007 Hey, Joe

We’ve been doing some performance analysis on our i5/OS V5R3 system and we’ve discovered that the SMIOSTCPGT process is producing an incredible number of synchronous disk operations, which could be slowing down system performance. What is SMIOSTCPGT and what can we do to stop it from bogging things down?

–Joe

Before I start this tip, I’ll come clean and admit that this question came from my own recent experience and it’s a problem I’m trying to find a solution for. I’m presenting the problem here as documentation for other administrators experiencing the same issue and to gather more information on

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Fix Decimal Data Errors

June 13, 2007 Bruce Guetzkow

Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here, and it has been updated since it originally ran [Updated 06/13/07]

I have seen requests many times in the forums from programmers asking how best to handle data with invalid decimal data. Typically this type of error is first discovered when a program ends abnormally. I have found this problem occurs most often with data received from outside sources: customers and vendors. Many times this data comes from systems other than a System i. I’ve developed a command to identify and (optionally) “fix” errant data.

What’s in a

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Joining on Mismatched Values

June 13, 2007 Hey, Ted

Like many shops, we have a mixture of database files that we have acquired from different sources due to mergers and acquisitions over the years. Getting things to match up is challenging, to put it mildly. I have two files that contain warehouse code fields, but the codes do not match exactly. In one file, a certain warehouse is indicated by the letter T. In the other file, the same warehouse is the character 1 (one). All other warehouses have the same codes in both files.

I need to join these files, but I don’t know what to do about

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Admin Alert: Alternative Ways to Print PC5250 Screens

June 13, 2007 Joe Hertvik

Most PC5250 green-screen users like using the Print Screen icon for sending screen shots to networked printers. However, there are two lesser-known PC5250 screen capture functions that can send screen shots to i5/OS output queues or to collect screen shots and print them as a group to a Windows networked printer, rather than printing each shot individually as they do when using Print Screen.

This week, I’ll look at two alternatives to PC5250’s Print Screen icon and the benefits they provide to your shop. While clicking on Print Screen is fairly easy for the users, these other alternatives offer

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Special Files Can Do It All, Part 2

June 6, 2007 Hey, Ted

I just wanted to tell you how much I appreciate your real world ideas and examples. They are the kinds of ideas that can really help smaller shops do the practical, bulletproof kinds of jobs we need to do. I have used your special files technique to replace some old System/36 #GSORT sales analysis programs. I know, it takes us a long time to convert, but some of these programs have not changed in 15 years.

We have S/36 OCL procedures that display a screen to ask for parameters, use #GSORT to create an address-out file using the parameters for

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