Does RPG have anything equivalent to CL’s Delay Job (DLYJOB) command? I am working on an RF application, and I need to code a delay of a few seconds into my program. Besides using a do loop with a final value of 1,000,000,000,000, how can I cause a timed interval within an RPG program?

–David

Thanks to the wonders of the Integrated Language Environment, RPG has a way to delay a job a specific number of seconds. It’s called sleep. Sleep requires one 4-byte unsigned integer parameter–the number of seconds to delay–which must be passed by value.

Here’s an example:

Today’s tip addresses the new built-in functions available in DB2 for i (a.k.a. DB2 for i5/OS, SQL/400, and DB2 UDB for iSeries), change stamp columns and row change expressions.

ASCII and CHR Functions

The ASCII and CHR functions are great additions to DB2 for i. The ASCII function will take the left most character of a string expression and return the ASCII character code equivalent. Take the following example:

Select ASCII(' ') From SysIBM/SysDummy1

This command will return a value of 32 (ASCII code for space) instead of the expected EBCDIC value of 64.

The CHR (character) function behaves the

One shop I work with went through a tape drive revolution with two recent hardware purchases. They went from using several different tape drive formats to using one higher speed backup format for all locations. Here’s what they found out from the experience, and how a simple tape drive upgrade helped them lower their operational tape management costs.

Before the Upgrade

In late 2007, a mishmash of tape drive styles dominated this shop’s backup capabilities in the company’s data center. One System i 520 machine with two partitions (production and development) used two Ultrium LTO tape drives to back up