• Guru: Putting Failure Handling In Its Place

  August 24, 2026 Gregory Simmons

  One of the things I enjoy most about procedure-driven RPG is that it encourages us to think about responsibility. Every procedure should have a clear purpose. It should perform one task well and leave unrelated concerns to other parts of the application.

  That sounds straightforward enough, yet one responsibility often finds its way into nearly every procedure we write: failure handling.

  If you have worked with RPG for any length of time, you have probably encountered applications where nearly every procedure begins with a MONITOR operation. The procedure performs its work, catches any exception that occurs, logs an error, returns …

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• Guru: Claude’s SQL Tip

  August 10, 2026 Ted Holt

  Today’s tip comes to us from Claude, as in the AI chatbot created by Anthropic. I don’t need to introduce him. Many readers of this august publication are far better acquainted with him than I am. I have heard reports of IBM i programmers who have quit writing source code, telling Claude to write it for them. Some folks seem to be right proud of that fact. Furthermore, I’m told that some places no longer allow humans to write source code.

  I had a few ideas in mind for this article and was weighing the merits of each one when …

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• Guru: Beyond Three-Part Naming – Running SQL Across Remote IBM i Systems

  August 3, 2026 Gregory Simmons

  In my article Guru: Finding Data in The Forest – Exploring Three-Part Naming In SQL, I helped you to get started with three-part naming. If you have a network of IBM i systems and haven’t availed yourself of this capability, you may be surprised at just how powerful it can be. Instead of relying on data transfers, replication, or intermediate files, SQL can reach directly into remote systems as though the data were local.

  That works well when you know exactly which remote system contains the data you need. But what happens when your network grows from a handful …

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• Guru: Deterministic Application Development With AI

  July 27, 2026 Dan Darnell and Eric Whitcomb

  Perhaps the key feature of AI is the way answers are obtained by virtue of a conversation with the AI. Contrast this with using a search engine where each “ask” is an independent request with a response.

  An AI conversation has context while search engine interactions do not. More and more, we use AI to create applications through the contextual, iterative, conversational process. As we have ideas we add these to the conversation and our application changes accordingly. Our customers are getting in on the action too. They are providing us with AI generated prototypes for new software or new …

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• Guru: Analyzing User Session Statistics, Part 1

  July 20, 2026 Mike Larsen

  I wanted to report on user activity on our IBM i. Knowing that there is a wealth of SQL table functions available to me, I knew it wouldn’t be hard to find something that would help me. For this report, I wanted to see how many times a user logged into the system during a certain timeframe.

  The table function I used is QSYS2.HISTORY_LOG_INFO. I’ll show the code I built, followed by a breakdown of what is does.

  Here is the SQL statement to determine the number of times a user signed in:

  SELECT COUNT(DISTINCT DATE(MESSAGE_TIMESTAMP)) AS DAYS_LOGGED_IN
  FROM 

  …

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• Guru: Finding Data In The Forest – Exploring Three-Part Naming In SQL

  June 22, 2026 Gregory Simmons

  Anyone who has spent time foraging for mushrooms knows that location matters. A chanterelle found in the Pacific Northwest is not the same as one discovered in the hardwood forests of the Midwest. Experienced foragers do not simply note what they found. They record exactly where they found it: the region, the forest, and the specific location. Context matters.

  The same is true in SQL. Most IBM i developers are comfortable with two-part naming. A reference like MUSHLIB.FORAGE_LOG identifies both the schema and the object. It tells SQL where to look within a single system, much like noting the forest …

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• Guru: Single Threading A Program Execution

  June 15, 2026 Chris Ringer

  A paceline in cycling is a formation where all the cyclists ride in a single file line and the lead bike is pulling the group along as everyone else is drafting behind. Eventually the lead bike will drift to the side and to the back of the line, and the next bike will take the lead for the group.

  If a spirited cyclist leaves the paceline and goes alone, all the aerodynamic benefits of drafting are lost.

  

  Likewise, at my organization, we have a CL job that is submitted hourly throughout the day every day. Normally the submitted job completes …

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• Guru: Where’s The Table?

  June 8, 2026 Ted Holt

  It began with an irritation. I considered it a simple request. “Which file did my SQL query read?” I was using the Run SQL Scripts tool to modify an SQL query with unqualified table names. And yet I knew of no ready way to determine the schema (library) name of any of the files. How was I to know which tables I had just queried?

  Let me back up a bit. My SQL client of choice is the Run SQL Scripts tool, which is part of IBM’s Access Client Solutions (ACS). It is not unusual for me to copy and …

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• Guru: SQL Sequences In RPG Let Db2 Handle The Counting

  June 1, 2026 Gregory Simmons

  There is something deeply satisfying about letting the database do the counting for you. In a world where we have spent decades hand-rolling identifiers, guarding them with locks, and hoping no job collides with another, SQL sequences feel like discovering a patch of mushrooms that quietly regenerate overnight. You stop worrying about scarcity and start focusing on what matters.

  In a procedure driven RPG system, this is exactly the kind of responsibility we want to isolate. Generating a new identifier is not business logic. It is not validation. It is not formatting. It is a single, well-defined action that deserves …

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• Guru: DateTime Rules Of Thumb

  May 18, 2026 Ted Holt

  I am not a great programmer. I am a decent programmer who has found ways to stay out of trouble. I use many little rules of thumb to keep me and the people I serve from being unpleasantly surprised at inopportune moments. Today I share rules of thumb regarding datetime data that have served me in my work.

  The first date field I used in an RPG program was a six-digit zoned-decimal value in MMDDYY format. This was part of a programming assignment for a class I was taking at the local vocational-technical center in days of yore. In my …

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