• Guru: More Date And Time Conversions Using SQL

  March 26, 2018 Ted Holt

  Since many, if not most, IBM i shops store dates and times in numeric and character fields, it behooves those of us who program those systems to understand all available date- and time-conversion tools. A conversation with a fellow attendee of the recent RPG & DB2 Summit made me realize that I had not written about certain SQL conversion methods.

  IBM i programmers need to convert date, time, and timestamp data from one format to another for at least two reasons. First, we can’t do date and time arithmetic with numeric and character fields. Second, the people whom we serve …

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• Guru: Use SQL To Find Duplicate Source Code

  March 12, 2018 Ted Holt

  According to Brian Tracy, “good habits are hard to develop but easy to live with; bad habits are easy to develop but hard to live with. The habits you have and the habits that have you will determine almost everything you achieve or fail to achieve.” This is as true in programming as in anything else we may do.

  Unfortunately, even those of us who strive for good work habits often have to follow the work of people who did not. One bad habit I come across occasionally is known in software engineering as WET solutions. WET stands for “write …

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• Guru: Searching Teraspace

  March 5, 2018 Jon Paris

  In my previous tip, Sorting In Teraspace, I looked at how the qsort API can be used to sequence data in ways that SortA can’t begin to approach. Now that the data is sorted, one of the things I may want to do with it is to search it. In this tip I will look at how that can be achieved using the bsearch API. The approach I will be discussing allows for partial key searches and handling the fact that such a search may result in multiple hits.

  As you will see when we work through the code, …

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• Guru: Ready Or Not, Big Changes in RDi V9.6! Part 1, Key Behavior

  February 26, 2018 Susan Gantner

  Version 9.6 of RDi has many new features. If you’ve upgraded your RDi, you have undoubtedly noticed some of the enhancements, because most of the new features are enabled by default. Just in case you’re not a huge fan of some of those features, most can also be disabled to make things work as before if you know where to look.

  In this series, we’ll take a look at some of the new features and how to enable and/or disable them. In this first part, we’ll study two new key behaviors and how to control them.

  Many of the enhancements …

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• Guru: Moving A Web Service To Another Web Server

  February 19, 2018 Mike Larsen

  IBM Integrated Web Services (IWS) makes it easy to create web services and deploy them to a web server. If you need to deploy the same service to multiple web servers, you could use IWS to manually create it on each server, but it would be time-consuming and error-prone. Simply missing a setting when creating the service can lead to unexpected results.

  Or you could automate the process. That would ensure the attributes of the service carry forward from server to server. While I won’t get into the web service creation process, as there are already many articles that address …

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• Guru: Combine Related Rows Using SQL

  February 12, 2018 Ted Holt

  A reader writes: “Hey, Ted. In our ERP system, certain business objects, such as sales orders and purchase orders, can have multiple comment records. Is it possible, using SQL, to combine all the comment records for an order into one long comment and retrieve it as a column in a result set?”

  I can relate to this. I can remember supporting an ERP system where not only the orders, but the order detail lines, could have such comments. End users depend heavily on such unstructured data to do their jobs. To answer your question, yes, it is possible and it …

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• Guru: Three Suboptimal I/O Practices

  February 5, 2018 Ted Holt

  I have on numerous occasions looked at source code that I had written in previous years and asked myself, “Why on earth did I do that? What could I have been thinking?” We live and learn, or at least we hope we learn. Today I share three database practices that I see from time to time that can be simplified. Maybe there’s something for you to learn today.

  Before I share the three examples, let me say that I do not consider the more cumbersome code to be wrong. To my way of thinking, any code that produces the correct …

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• Guru: An Update Conundrum Finally Solved!

  January 8, 2018 Ted Holt

  Russ writes, “Hey, Ted! I was trying to use a pure SQL solution to adjust some data today. My SQL statement worked fine in quality control, but failed in production. I’ve been wondering if the failure was caused by the database or by me! My problem was to renumber sequence numbers for a customer in a table.”

  Russ’s question arrived in my inbox on February 1, 2012. Yes, almost six years ago. At the time, I couldn’t help him. But with the latest technology refreshes from IBM, there is now a way to make the update work properly, and I’m …

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• Guru: Quirky SQL Creations

  December 11, 2017 Ted Holt

  Hey, Ted:

  We are creating a view from a source member using the Run SQL Statements (RUNSQLSTM) command. None of the objects are qualified in the source member. The system always creates the view in the wrong library, no matter how we set the current library. Can you tell me what is happening?

  –William

  William ran up against the quirky behavior of the SQL CREATE VIEW statement. It sure threw me for a loop. I would have thought that the view would be created in the current library. Not so. William found the answer to his question in the IBM …

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• Guru: A Handy Function for Unit Testing

  December 4, 2017 Paul Tuohy

  I would like to share a technique I use for dealing with lists in an RPG unit test program. According to Wikipedia, “. . . unit testing is a software testing method by which individual units of source code, sets of one or more computer program modules together with associated control data, usage procedures, and operating procedures, are tested to determine whether they are fit for use.”

  In the world of modern RPG, this translates to writing “test” programs to test a specific piece of code. For example, when I write a subprocedure, I will write a test program that …

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