One of your fellow subscribers sent me some performance tips that he says have made enormous performance improvements for his customers. He asked me to share them with you. Here’s the first one:

Change system value QDBFSTCCOL (Database file statistics collection) to *NONE during the day. Change the value to *ALL during non-peak times.

System value QDBFSTCCOL is shipped with a value of *ALL. The database statistics job is always running. Setting the system value to *NONE suspends the collector job. When you change the system value to *ALL, the collector job wakes up and any outstanding statistic requests are

Don’t Let SQL Name Your Baby gave some good advice on tackling the problems created by column names longer than 10 characters. Table names of more than 10 characters can also cause problems, especially if you need to add the same table on multiple systems. Plus, if you want to do updates in an RPG program, it’s nice to have a record format name different from the table name.

–Tim

Tim points out another discrepancy between the System i’s QSYS.LIB file system and relational databases that run on other systems. Using SQL, you can create a table with a very

Twice recently my shop ran into an interesting problem with System i Ethernet cards. We were migrating Ethernet line descriptions from one system to another and even though the source system was in restricted mode, the target Ethernet card refused to work correctly until the source system card was unplugged from the network. Here’s what happened and what it teaches us about how System i Ethernet cards work.

Why Migrate Line Descriptions?

Because this situation deals with conflicts caused by migrating configurations, let’s first look at why people migrate Ethernet line descriptions between systems. I can think of three separate