I recently had a discussion with some of my colleagues about the increased use of Data Definition Language (DDL) in SQL to define a database as opposed to traditional DDS. One of the items that came up in the discussion was that while people were using DDL to define tables and indexes, there seemed to be very few views being defined.

In this article I will discuss some of the benefits to be gained from using views–both within your applications and as a means to make data more readily accessible to your users.

What Is a View?

Those of us

Sometimes our users just keep their sessions open when they go home. At times, such as when we need to install software updates, this is a problem.

It is possible to write a CL that cleans up the file/member locks without getting too complicated? You’ll be happy to know it is. Unix to the rescue! All you need is to quickly hack together a small nine-line QSH shell script to do the job.

See this example file named unlock that lives in my /home/tvl directory on the IFS:

for file in $@; do
system "WRKOBJLCK OBJ($file) OBJTYPE(*FILE) 
MBR(*ALL)" 2>/dev/null | 

We have four IBM 6400 printers that produce pick tickets and labels. The printers are connected via SNA to a Perle 594e controller attached to our i5/OS box. Today, all the printers are freaking out. They start printing a pick ticket and then print garbage. Then they disconnect and I have to restart their printer devices. I have 1,000 tickets to print for tomorrow’s production. What’s happening?

–Jim

I contacted Jim and he gave me a few additional pieces of information that weren’t included in his original email. There had been a power brownout during the afternoon before the problem