Remember the bad old days when dinosaurs still roamed the earth and the only way to build strings in RPG involved playing silly games with arrays? Or worse still, obscure combinations of MOVE operations? Thankfully those days are far behind us–although sadly there are still a few RPG/400 dinosaurs coding away!

RPG IV introduced many powerful new string handling options, such as the %TRIMx family of BIFs, but even now there are capabilities in the language that few programmers fully exploit. One of my favorites is variable length fields. There are many good reasons to use these fields, but in

The Run SQL Scripts function, a.k.a. the SQL Script Center or Script Center, is System i Navigator’s counterpart to Interactive SQL on the green screen side of the System i. The SQL Script Center allows the user to execute all or a subset of a script that contains one or more SQL statements and/or batch CL commands. It is part of the Navigator Database function and is an extremely powerful and flexible tool with lots of function that can have a very positive impact on application developer productivity.

Interactive SQL has a very good multilevel SQL prompter that supports a

There’s a special place for restricted state processing in the i5/OS or OS/400 world. In restricted state, administrators can apply upgrades, change core system parameters, backup the operating system and run special commands that affect partition configurations. This week, I’ll examine everything about restricted state processing, from why it exists, to how to enter and leave this core operating system function.

The Beauty of Restriction

Some i5/OS functions can’t be run while the system is active. That’s why IBM created restricted state processing, a feature that isn’t available in many other operating systems. Restricted state occurs when you end all