• Admin Alert: One Common Cure for SQL0901 Package Errors

  September 13, 2006 Joe Hertvik

  The SQL0901 error is an incredibly frustrating error that occurs with i5 ODBC, OLE DB, and JDBC connections. Because SQL0901 is a general SQL error, it can be difficult to diagnose and harder to solve. This week I will look at one specific SQL0901 scenario, where the failure occurs inside SQL’s extended dynamic package support, and I will show you how to deal with this error in an i5 environment. What is Extended Dynamic Package Support? While the SQL0901 error can refer to a broad range of issues, this article focuses on diagnosing and correcting problems associated with SQL extended

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• Undocumented Debugger Function

  August 30, 2006 Hey, Ted

  Here’s a tip for those readers who, like me, still have to use the full-screen, green-screen debugger. I accidentally discovered that RPG supports a debugging option that is not documented in either the help text or the RPG programmer’s guide. If you want to break a program or procedure when a variable has a certain value, you can use a conditional breakpoint. In the following example, the program breaks at statement 12 if variable STATE has the value TX. break 12 when state = 'TX' Suppose you want to stop when part of a field contains a certain value? The

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• EDTF and End-of-Line Delimiters, Take Two

  August 30, 2006 Hey, Ted

  In EDTF and End-of-Line Delimiters, you demonstrated a method for removing carriage-return characters from end-of-line delimiters in stream files. Unfortunately, your method only works in interactive jobs. I need to do the same operation on a file that I need to FTP. Do you have a way to remove these characters in batch? –Chuck You have pointed out yet another violation of Holt’s Law of Interactive Programs, which states: “The problem with interactive programs is that you can’t run them in batch.” I have a few methods for you, Chuck. First, here’s one from Shalom Carmel, a really sharp

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• Admin Alert: Four iSeries Access Tips for Windows Professionals

  August 30, 2006 Joe Hertvik

  Ironically, one of the problems with iSeries Access for Windows is also one of its strengths: its longevity. Starting out as a product called PC Support/400 in the late 1980s and progressing through at least three different name changes, this software has a history so long that it’s almost geology. However, sometimes that history works against it, particularly when administrators who are not familiar with i5/OS and OS/400 are in charge of installing and maintaining iSeries Access for Windows desktops. To alleviate potential problems when Windows administrators handle IBM‘s connectivity package to AS/400, iSeries, and i5 servers, here are

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• Quick Query Over a Database File

  August 23, 2006 Dear esteemed professional colleagues

  Today’s tip is not rocket science, but as I have said before, rocket science won’t help me keep the factory running. Today I share with you a utility that I use constantly, day-in and day-out. Maybe some of you will find it handy as well. The utility of the day is a command I wrote years ago to help me with testing. As you well know, when you’re testing a program, you often have to look at database files to make sure they were modified correctly. The Display Physical File Member (DSPFFM) command is helpful sometimes, but it suffers

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• iSeries Navigator Performance Advisor, At Your Service

  August 23, 2006 Jeff Waldbillig

  It was a dark night on a network that knew how to keep its secrets. All my clusters were up, and you’d think I’d be happy doing nothing but waltzing through page after page of discount electronics auctions. But I wasn’t happy. I was being outbid on an older MP3 player by BlondScream544, and I knew, somehow, that I’d lose the machine, and it would live out the rest of its miserable, electronic life, pumping out the sounds of junk boy-bands known only to teen-aged girls, and those who wished they still were. I was considering raising the bid when

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• Joblogapalooza, Its Possible Causes, and a Call for Input

  August 23, 2006 Hey, Joe

  Last week the number of joblogs in our QEZJOBLOG output queue increased by thousands of spooled files. Auxiliary storage pool storage usage also increased from 74 percent to 96 percent. Even IBM can’t tell me what’s wrong. The only clues I have are that I keep getting a QSYSOPR CPF22E3 message that reads ‘User profile EXPLOIT is disabled’ and there are lots of QRWTSRVR joblogs in QEZJOBLOG. Do you have any idea what’s happening? –Laurent I don’t have a clear answer for what’s going on but I do have a few suspicions. Here’s what I think could be happening based

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• Mystifying OS/400 and i5/OS Mathematics

  August 9, 2006 Howard Arner

  A customer recently reported a bug in my SQL Thing product, but after investigation it turned out not to be a bug but the user’s perception of how decimal arithmetic works in the i5/OS operating system. The user was doing some arithmetic with decimal fields and then multiplying by 100 to show the value as a percent, and was getting a result of zero for all of his calculations. The real problem is in the way the AS/400, iSeries, and i5 handle promotion of precision and scale when decimal numbers are used in equations. If you are not careful,

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• Append to Stream Files

  August 9, 2006 Hey, IT Jungle Forums

  Is there an OS/400 command that will let me append one stream file to another? I checked the Copy Object (CPY) command, but it only has a REPLACE(*YES/*NO) parameter, unlike Copy File (CPYF), which supports MBROPT(*REPLACE/*ADD). –Bruce This question was posted on the IT Jungle Forums. It seems odd that there is no direct method using CL commands to append one stream file to another. Chris gave examples of two methods that do the job. The first is to use Qshell’s >> redirection operator, which appends output to the destination file. Here’s how it would work in a

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• Admin Alert: Running Green-Screen Commands from OpsNav, Part 2

  August 9, 2006 Joe Hertvik

  In a recent column, I covered how to use iSeries Navigator’s Run Command feature to submit batch i5/OS commands to an i5 system for execution. This week, I will cover some additional configurations that will help you set up other Run Command options, as well as to determine whether a specific batch command can be submitted for execution by Run Command. Run Command is a valuable OpsNav feature that allows you to graphically enter and send batch i5/OS commands to an i5 partition for execution (see Part 1 of this article for basic information on how to use Run

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