This is the first in a series of four articles by Brian Kelley on PHP.

Our company has been following your sometimes promising, sometimes depressing, articles and responses regarding a natural modern interface to the System i and RPG. If IBM wants to build these interfaces for its other platforms, that’s fine too, but I don’t really care about those–at least right now. Though I would like the “Good Brian” to be correct in his opinion of the IBM reorganization (see IBM’s Reorg: The Good Me or the Bad Me?), what I have seen from IBM leads me to

We have started using SQL Data Definition Language (DDL) to define our physical files. One feature we really like is that we can use column (field) names longer than 10 characters. One feature we don’t like is that SQL creates ugly alternate names of 10 characters that we end up using in our RPG programs. Is there any way we can rename these ugly names?

–Paul

I know what you mean, Paul. If a column name is more than 10 characters long, SQL creates a shorter column name from the first five characters of the field name and a five-digit

For any number of reasons, you may sometime have to move a System i, iSeries, or AS/400 from one physical location to another. The move may be caused by a company sale or spin-off, or you may have a high availability machine that needs to be hosted off site. Whatever the reason, this week I’ll present a practical checklist of items to address when moving a System i box.

My checklist is short and simple. It can be divided into the following three categories that cover the majority of moving issues that you’ll run into:

1. Physically moving the box–What’s