So far in this series, we’ve covered how IBM has made life easier for DB2 for i (formerly called DB2/400 or DB2 UDB for iSeries) developers by:

• Part 1: Cramming greater query functionality and operations into a single statement
• Part 2: Providing an easy way to summarize data with super groups and grouping sets
• Part 3: Giving developers options to implement audit tracking and other features useful in a client/server environment by implementing several new client special registers

This tip will cover yet another valuable subset of features: new indexing and data type features.

Building an Index

In this article I will take a closer look at how commitment control works by looking at the journal entries for commitment control. I will also discuss the LCKLVL and CMTSCOPE parameters on the STRCMTCTL command.

Commitment Control and Journals

Commitment control is dependant upon the use of a journal. A journal is used in conjunction with commitment control as follows:

• When you start commitment control (using the STRCMTCTL command), a commitment boundary entry is placed in the journal.
• As a program inserts, updates, and deletes rows in a table, the rows are actually inserted, updated, and deleted, and the

We’re using Help/Systems Robot/SCHEDULE version 9.0 to schedule batch jobs on an i5/OS V5R4 machine, and it works great. However, I have a new requirement to alert my staff whenever a Robot job fails to run or terminates unexpectedly. Do you know of any utilities that can monitor and send out email pages when this happens?

–Bob

Given that Robot/SCHEDULE is one of the most widely used utilities in iSeries, System i, and Power i shops, I’ve run into this problem before and wrote a utility to do exactly what you’re talking about. I’ve run this utility on Robot/SCHEDULE version