• Guru: Elapsed Time For Human Beings

  August 2, 2021 Ted Holt

  Quick! Think of a weird animal! Perhaps you thought of the platypus, a duck-billed mammal that lays eggs. Maybe Dr. Doolittle’s pushmi-pullyu jumped to mind. Maybe you thought of a politician or a musician or your next-door neighbor. I know a weird animal that you probably didn’t think of.

  The weird animal I have in mind is called the duration. This animal is found in SQL queries. There are three species: timestamp, date, and time. Today I write about the challenges of interacting with this strange entity. I’ll use the timestamp duration as an example. Interacting with date …

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• Guru: Getting Meaningful Audit Information from a Journal

  July 26, 2021 Paul Tuohy

  Journaling is an invaluable tool that is used for data recovery, data replication, commitment control and, of course, auditing. But getting at the audit information in an easy-to-use manner can be cumbersome. In this article I want to introduce you to a stored procedure that will create an audit table for any table/physical file and a corresponding view that can be used for easy auditing of changes.

  For example, if I am auditing the EMPLOYEE table (I will be using the EMPLOYEE table in the standard Db2 Sample Database) for a change to the SALARY column, I would use the …

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• Guru: One-Shot Requests and Quoted Column Names

  July 19, 2021 Ted Holt

  If I had a dollar for every time someone has asked me to query data for them over the years, I could have retired already. (I did not say I would have, but that I could have.) It’s nice when the users can retrieve the information they need to do their jobs without help from IT, but when a request is too complex for them, I’m always glad to help.

  I’ve used many tools over the years for one-shot requests for raw data. These days my tool of choice is the Run SQL Scripts tool, which is part of IBM …

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• Guru: Web Services, DATA-INTO and DATA-GEN, Part 3

  July 12, 2021 Jon Paris

  In this tip I’m going to discuss some of the options used with DATA-GEN and DATA-INTO to deal with the fact that element names in JSON and XML frequently contain characters that are not legal in RPG names.

  This is important because RPG’s -INTO and -GEN operations rely on names to map elements. So if the document we are processing uses names that are not legal in RPG how can we handle that? As you will see, when dealing with -INTO operations they are quite easily handled. DATA-GEN, on the other hand, presents a different problem and we will get …

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• Guru: Understanding Database Performance Using The Performance Data Investigator, Part 2

  June 28, 2021 Dawn May

  This is the second in a two-part series on how you can use the Performance Data Investigator (PDI) to investigate performance of Db2 for i. While the SQL Performance Center in Access Client Solutions is more commonly known than PDI, using both tools is a good way to analyze database performance.

  In Part 1, I reviewed the Database content package, focusing on the charts for I/O reads and writes, SQL CPU utilization, and database locks. In this tech tip, I continue by reviewing the charts related to SQL Cursor and Native DB Opens as well as the SQL Performance …

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• 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 …

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• 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 …

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• 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 …

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• 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 …

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• 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 …

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