It is my pleasure to feature a software tool that has proven very valuable to me. It’s called FROG. It runs on a PC and provides an SQL interface to DB2 for i. What’s more, it’s free. Let me show you one way I frequently use it.

If you’ll visit the FROG home page, you’ll find that FROG is provided to you free of charge by Innovative Systems, LLC. You also find information about what you don’t need (e.g., an ODBC connection) and what you will have to have (e.g., Client Access).

Figure 1.

Figure 1 is the DB2

I still fondly remember that “ah-ha!” moment many years ago when I was first introduced to the S/38 and discovered the joys of the consistency that resulted from centrally described data items and the ability to define a new field as looking like another. While other languages I had worked with, such as COBOL, had copy directives that allowed you to bring in standard definitions, the S/38 was the only machine I had come across where such ideas were built into the actual system itself and all of the compilers took advantage of them in one way or another.

RPG/400

Last week, I began describing the strategy and methodology that a company I work with used in preparing for a i5/OS Capacity BackUp (CBU) system to switch over and impersonate their live production system for several days. This week, I’ll continue the example by describing how they prepped their applications, users, batch processes, and the system itself for a live switch over.

The Framework for Making the Switch

A CBU is an i, System i, or iSeries machine in waiting, receiving replicated data and other system objects from a production partition. In an emergency, the CBU can be activated to