FHG Archives - Page 20 of 144

Porting A User Profile From One IBM i Machine To Another

July 23, 2014 Hey, Joe

We’re consolidating our IBM i partitions on another Power 7+ machine that belongs to my parent company. They want to move and install some special-purpose user profiles from of their partitions to one of our partitions. What’s the best way to port a user profile from one partition to another?

–Tim

You have two choices here. 1) You can either take a printout of the user profiles in question and manually recreate them on your target machine; or 2) You can back up and restore the user profiles from one machine to another.

My preference is to back up and

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The Geezer’s Guide To Free-Form RPG, Part 4: Prototypes and Procedure Interfaces

July 9, 2014 Jon Paris

As promised in Part 3 of this Geezer’s Guide, this time I am going to be looking at the new support for prototypes and procedure interfaces. There are not a large number of enhancements in this area. Mostly they consist of improvements in the compiler’s use of defaults. Of course they also inherit all of the data definition enhancements in areas such as data type and length.

Prototypes

Let’s start with prototypes and see how they have changed. The basic building blocks are dcl-pr and dcl-parm. As with dcl-subf in data structures, the dcl-parm is optional and only needed when

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Advantageous Options

July 9, 2014 Ted Holt

It happens to all of us. Someone tells us he needs a program just like an existing one, but with one small change. We clone the program, modify the clone, and now instead of one program to maintain when business requirements change, we have two. Before we know it, we have eight or 10 or more. Fortunately, there is a simple but seldom-used technique we can often use to avoid cloning programs.

The technique to which I refer is to use an option parameter. An option parameter controls the behavior of a program. Contrast option parameters to data parameters, which

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Admin Alerts: Old IBM i Backups, New Tricks

July 9, 2014 Joe Hertvik

If you’re like most IBM i administrators, your backup routine is probably set in stone and you don’t really need to change it all that much. It’s solid and it works. But sometimes things happen and you may need to tweak your backup to accommodate new situations or needs. This week, let’s look at three different scenarios where you might have to change or modify your backup solution.

Our Backup Scenarios

Here are three different backup situations you may encounter that could force you to make some small but significant changes to your backup routines.

Developing a new IBM i

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DB2 for i 7.2 Features and Fun, Part 1

June 30, 2014 Michael Sansoterra

The dump truck of database features driven by IBM is delivering yet again, unloading a full load of great enhancements for the beloved DB2 for i RDBMS. In addition to the new features included in the various IBM i 7.1 technology refresh (TR) releases, 7.2 has even more security, developer, and administrative friendly enhancements that I’ll be discussing in this and future tips.

TRUNCATE TABLE

The TRUNCATE TABLE statement is used for deleting all of the rows in a table in one fell swoop. You can think of this statement as SQL’s version of the Clear Physical File Member (CLRPFM)

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Here’s More Help For A Huge Hardship

June 25, 2014 Ted Holt

In the April 16, 2014, issue of this august publication, I shared how encoded vector indexes can help with the task of summarizing data from large tables. Tom McKinley of IBM graciously emailed me with more information about that technique, and it is my pleasure to pass Tom’s wisdom along to you.

Assume two tables–one of items, one of sales.

create table Items
  ( Item        char (12) not null,
    Description char (25),
    Cost        dec  (7,2),
    Price       dec  (7,2),
  primary key (Item))

create table Sales
  ( ID                integer as identity,
    Invoice           dec  (9,0),
    Line              dec  (3,0),
    InvoiceDate       date,
    Customer          dec  (7,0),

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Admin Alert: Reorganizing IBM i Files To Improve Disk Performance, Part 2

June 25, 2014 Joe Hertvik

Last issue, I began putting together a template for detecting and efficiently reorganizing physical files on IBM i partitions. I covered the most common reasons administrators reorganize files and demonstrated a procedure for detecting which files on your system need reorganization. This week, I’ll complete the process by reviewing different ways to reorganize files and look at some techniques for file reorganization while the file is active.

Steps To Effectively Reorganizing Files

As I discussed last time, here are the steps to follow for an effective disk reorganization strategy.

Set up a procedure for identifying files and members that need

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Custom Perspectives In RSE

June 11, 2014 Susan Gantner

In my earlier tip, Who Needs ?, I described how to create a custom perspective and I also described one scenario when custom perspectives come in handy. I promised to follow that up with another way to use custom perspectives.

I’m often asked questions such as:

How do I keep my Outline from disappearing when I’m in full-screen edit?
How can I see my RPG Indentation view alongside the full-screen editor view of the source member?

Custom perspectives can be used as one answer to both questions.

Of course, when you’re in full-screen edit, you can “peek” at any

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Surmounting Identity Column Challenges

June 11, 2014 Ted Holt

Using an identity column is a wonderful way to ensure that each row of a table (record of a physical file) has a unique identifier. It sure beats storing the next batch (invoice, transaction, etc.) number in a data area or a one-record database file. Here are a few things to keep in mind when inserting rows (writing records) into a table that has an identity column.

1. Let the system assign the value to the identity column. You do this by specifying GENERATED ALWAYS or omitting the GENERATED option when you create the table.

create table Sales
  ( ID

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Admin Alert: Reorganizing IBM i Files To Improve Disk Performance, Part 1

June 11, 2014 Joe Hertvik

One of the easiest ways to improve IBM i performance is to make sure all your critical files are reorganized on a regular basis. Files with excessive deleted records take longer to read because each returned record block contains deleted as well as active records. The next two columns, I’ll present a template for detecting and reorganizing your most active files to improve disk processing efficiency.

Why We Reorg

There are several good reasons for reorganizing files with large numbers of deleted records, including:

1. Conserving disk space–If your disk is filling up, you can retrieve a fair amount

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