• Guru: Understanding Database Performance Using The Performance Data Investigator, Part 1

  June 21, 2021 Dawn May

  This is a two-part series on how to use the Performance Data Investigator (PDI) for investigating performance of Db2 for i. While the SQL Performance Center in Access Client Solutions is the tool of choice for Db2 performance analysis, there is valuable information that you can get from using PDI. PDI is often a useful starting point to help guide you in the correct direction when trying to identify performance issues. In my experience, PDI is under-utilized for Db2 investigation. For those not familiar with PDI, you may want to read the article, Getting Started with the Performance Data Investigator …

  Read more

• Guru: Use SQL To Replace Reports

  June 14, 2021 Ted Holt

  Does anybody write report programs anymore? If so, why? Reports are so twentieth-century. The people we serve want spreadsheets, Web pages, cell-phone apps and other modern conveniences. What we need is an easy way to make our report programs write the same information to modern interfaces without having to perform major surgery on them.

  Some 10 years or so ago, I built a scripting language to enable me to reformat spooled files into stream files in CSV format. I called my utility BASS. It was, and continues to be, a successful project.

  But BASS is not the only way …

  Read more

• Guru: The Essential Workers Of IT, And Lessons Learned From Trying Times

  June 7, 2021 Rob McNelly

  Over the past year we’ve all heard about essential workers. Essential workers are present in our industry as well. Those who manage and maintain our power grids and technology infrastructures have always played a vital role. It’s easy to overlook these professionals, but they shouldn’t be taken for granted. In 2020, their mostly unnoticed efforts were particularly important.

  Don’t get me wrong; I’m not necessarily putting IT workers on the same level as healthcare workers or first responders. My point is simply that during the pandemic, we were reminded that some aspects of our jobs can only be accomplished by …

  Read more

• Guru: Generate SQL for Dependents

  May 24, 2021 Paul Tuohy

  Way back in October 2014, in the article Find A View Of A View Of A View. . ., I detailed a stored procedure that, given the name of a table or a view, provides the full list of dependent views and all of their dependents and all of their dependents, etc. This is a stored procedure that has served me well in the world of DDL, where it is common to have views of views of views.

  In this article I will describe a follow-on stored procedure that will generate the DDL for a given table/view and all …

  Read more

• Guru: How To Acquire The IBM i Administration Runtime Expert Product And PTFs

  May 17, 2021 Dawn May

  In past articles about the Administration Runtime Expert, I mentioned that you install the ARE licensed program product on your central system, but I never documented steps on how you acquire the 5733-ARE program product. I apologize for this oversight since, as it turns out, obtaining ARE is not immediately obvious.

  To get the 5733-ARE product, you must log into the IBM Support website and go to your Entitled Systems Support page. Under My Entitled Software, select Software Downloads. You need to select your system that is entitled to IBM software, the category of IBM i, and then …

  Read more

• Guru: Date Format Confusion

  May 10, 2021 Ted Holt

  Hey, Ted:

  I use the Copy to Import File (CPYTOIMPF) command to build a CSV file to be sent to a MySQL system. My colleagues are unable to import the file because of the format of a timestamp field. CPYTOIMPF puts a hyphen between the date and time (e.g. 2021-05-10-04.36.24.849555), but the other system wants a space between them. Other than writing a custom program do you know of another way to change the format of the timestamp output?

  — Richard

  You won’t need a custom program, Richard. There’s another way to handle this requirement.

  IBM has already very thoughtfully …

  Read more

• Guru: Customizing RDi Beyond Preferences

  May 3, 2021 Susan Gantner

  In my last tip , I covered a few of the preferences that I like to change to customize the way I use RDi. But there are a number of other customizations I use that aren’t implemented via the Preferences dialogs. I’ll continue the customization topic in this tip by covering some of those other options.

  Compile-Related Customizations

  I’ll start out with a couple of things I like to change related to compiling code. This includes customizing and creating new compile commands and modifying my compile Error List.

  I like to modify some of the parameters for the “ordinary” compile …

  Read more

• Guru: A Simple Script That Capitalizes on IBM i’s Open Source Capabilities

  April 26, 2021 Rob McNelly

  In my last piece, we got Yum and Bash running on IBM i. Now let’s build on that foundation to find an open campsite.

  I’m serious. Recently I used an IBM i LPAR to schedule a hiking and camping trip to the Grand Canyon. Where to begin? My bio, perhaps. Here it’s mentioned that “Rob enjoys camping, hiking, biking, and backpacking through the mountains of Arizona. . . . His favorite trip was hiking to the blue waters of Havasupai, and he is planning on hiking the Grand Canyon in the near future.”

  So last summer I went …

  Read more

• Guru: Compare Pieces Of Source Members

  April 19, 2021 Ted Holt

  Next to Barbara Morris, the F15 key seems to be the RPG programmer’s best friend. I do not like duplicated source code, but for years I have been finding it everywhere. Sometimes I find the same source code in multiple source members. Sometimes I find the same source code two or more times in a single source member. If you’ve been programming in an IBM i shop for more than two hours, you know what I’m talking about.

  As I wrote three years ago in this august publication, duplicated source code is bad because it embodies the WET principle, …

  Read more

• Guru: Web Services, DATA-INTO and DATA-GEN, Part 2

  April 12, 2021 Jon Paris

  In Part 1 of this series I discussed the use of DATA-GEN and DATA-INTO to create “blog entries” via a web service. This time I am going to focus on using the GET HTTP method to retrieve blog entries. As you will see the basic process is very similar.

  I am going to start by retrieving a single blog post, but rather than retrieve all of the data associated with the post I will show you how to restrict processing to specific elements. I will then move on to look at two approaches to processing multiple posts. The first processes …

  Read more

Previous Articles Next Articles