• Admin Alert: Six Things To Do Before Switching Production Processing To Your CBU

  May 1, 2013 Joe Hertvik

  Switching production processing to an IBM i Capacity BackUp (CBU) system involves more than just running the High Availability (HA) software commands that initiate the switch. It also involves preparing your source and target machines to switch places, so that data is correctly replicated and you can confidently run production processing on your CBU. Today, I’ll describe six steps you can take to ensure a smooth CBU switch over. Setting The Stage This article lists out tasks you should consider adding to your HA run book to produce the best results when switching production processing to an IBM i CBU

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• Encoding XML (Or HTML) From Within RPG

  April 17, 2013 Bob Cozzi

  RPG developers who jump to the web and CGI programming soon learn that a stream-based syntax requires the use of certain control characters. Unlike native database, which uses structures and hidden attributes to control field size and starting and ending locations, HTML and XML rely on <i>tags</i>, agreed-upon syntax for start and end delimiters. You may be familiar with Comma Separated Values and the use of both the comma and the double-quote as the delimiters for that type of file. XML and HTML use much more verbose values as their tags or delimiters. Tags do double duty; they separate data

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• Extract Zoned And Packed-Decimal Values From Character Fields, Take Two

  April 17, 2013 Ted Holt

  Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here. Sometimes a reader of this august publication asks me about a problem that I don’t face, and I reply with an academic answer. But when I face the same problem, my interest ceases to be academic, and I look for a more practical solution. Such is the case with the use of SQL to extract packed- and zoned-decimal fields from a string of character data. In the January 19, 2005, issue of Four Hundred Guru, I answered a question from Mary, who wanted to create a logical

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• How Do I Load This Digital Certificate On My IBM i Machine?

  April 17, 2013 Hey, Joe

  A banking client is requiring us to load a Verisign Class Secure Server CA – G3 certificate authority (CA) certificate on my IBM i box. But when I try to load it into Digital Certificate Manager (DCM), DCM gives me this error: “An error occurred during certificate validation. The issuer of the certificate may not be in the certificate store or the issuer may not be enabled.” What’s going on? –WC This is a fairly common problem and it has an easy solution. The certificate won’t load because in addition to loading the bank’s Verisign Class Secure Server CA –

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• Bringing Home The Data

  April 3, 2013 Michael Sansoterra

  In IBM i 7.1 Technology Refresh 4 (TR4), IBM gave SQL developers the ability to insert data into a local database table from a remote DB2 for i database table within the comfort of a single SQL statement. (See my article Copy Data From A Remote DB2 Database Using DB2 For i 7.1 for more info). With Technology Refresh 5, specifically DB2 for i Group PTF Level 18 or later, you can dynamically create a local table and insert data into it directly from a remote DB2 for i database query using the CREATE TABLE … AS statement. Recall that

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• Updating Through A Join With SQL, Take Three

  April 3, 2013 Ted Holt

  As I was looking for something in the DB2 for i SQL reference, my eyes happened to see MERGE in the list of statements, and I realized that I had been doing something the hard way. I realized that I was about to abandon the method I had been using to update values in one database table (physical file) from data in another one. Once in a while, someone requests that I use a list of values, which are usually stored in a spreadsheet, to mass update the database on the big computer. Fortunately, several years ago I learned how

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• Admin Alert: A Checklist For Monitoring Your IBM i Environment

  April 3, 2013 Joe Hertvik

  IBM i administration has elements of old-time system operations and real-time monitoring. You need to ensure that everything is working correctly and that problems aren’t silently developing that can: a) interfere with customer processing; and b) violate customer service-level agreement (SLA) requirements or create audit violations. This week, let’s flesh out a checklist of items to help IBM i admins achieve these goals. The Essential Piece In order to catch trouble before it occurs, I highly recommend that you set up an IBM i monitoring system to catch developing situations and alert you via email or text when a problem

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• Tips For Using RDP’s DDS Designer

  March 20, 2013 Susan Gantner

  In my Guru tip on the DDS Designer in Rational Developer for Power Systems, I showed you the basics of using the DDS Designer to create or maintain screens. A few changes have been made to the DDS Design tool in recent releases of RDP, and I’ve also had a bit more experience with it. So I decided it was time for an update on the topic. The most obvious change that has happened in recent releases is that the DDS Design perspective can now automatically be opened on a double-click of a DSPF or PRTF source member. You

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• Using SQL Joins With Tree Structures

  March 20, 2013 Ted Holt

  Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here. The reason tree structures are important to me is not that they are so numerous, but that I use them every day. I don’t write programs to process tree structures every day, but many of the programs I have written still run every day. For that reason, I must know fast ways to extract data from tree structures. One such method is the SQL join. This article is a rewrite of the topic “Efficient Database Retrieval” from my article Recursion and the Alternatives, which I wrote eight

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• Using Incremental IFS Backup To Speed Up Backup Time

  March 20, 2013 Hey, Joe

  Is there a trick to speeding up AS/400 Integrated File System (IFS) nightly backups? My nightly backups run over 300 minutes and 120 of those minutes are tied to the IFS backup, so it runs into production hours. Here’s the Save (SAV) command I’m using to backup the IFS. SAV DEV('/QSYS.LIB/TAP01.DEVD') OBJ(('/*') + ('/QSYS.LIB' *OMIT) ('/QDLS' *OMIT)) + SAVACT(*SYNC) ENDOPT(*UNLOAD) + UPDHST(*YES) DTACPR(*DEV) — C To cut down on IFS backup times, you can modify your backups to perform a full IFS backup once a week and an incremental backup the other nights of the week. Here’s how this works.

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