I/O Archives - IT Jungle

Guru: One Way To Deal With Two Null Formats

July 8, 2019 Ted Holt

Hey, Ted:

We are building a new system and want to use modern programming and database techniques. I have had quite a time trying to get nulls to act right. It gets confusing fast because RPG handles them differently than the way embedded SQL does. When using SQL for I/O, how do we handle the two null formats?

— Brian

There are several ways to go about the “problem” of nulls. Let me give you one simple method, but keep in mind that it’s not the only way.

First, let’s create a table and put some data into it.
```
create 
```
…
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Speaking The SQL Lingua Franca On IBM i

June 3, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

No matter what the job is, we all start out somewhere that is pretty far from being an expert and we depend on our elders and mentors to help us learn all the tricks and get good at the work.

So it is with the nearly ubiquitous database query language, Structured Query Language, or SQL for short. It started out in the head of IBMer Ted Codd back in 1969, which was coincidentally when the System/3 minicomputer launched and its successor many generations later, the System/38 in 1978, was the first IBM system and the first system in the world …
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Deep Dive On IBM i 7.4 And IBM i 7.3 TR6 Hardware Limits

April 29, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

As everybody knows by now, IBM has announced both the Technology Refresh 6 for IBM i 7.3 and the shiny new IBM i 7.4 release. We did a brief overview of these operating system releases in last Wednesday’s issue, concurrent with the launch and ahead of their respective May 10 and June 21 general availability dates, to put them into perspective. Now, it is time to get into the nuts and bolts and bits and bytes of what Big Blue has announced.

Rather than try to do it all in one story or possibly two, we are breaking it …
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Power Systems Refreshes Flash Drives, Promises NVM-Express For IBM i

April 29, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

There was a time after Mark Olsen retired a few years back when the presentations concerning Power Systems hardware as it related to the IBM i platform were not as detailed as we were used to. But a new team of people are running the show now, and they are getting better and that helps us all understand what Big Blue is doing on the hardware front even better.

As part of the April 23 announcements, IBM added a bunch of new storage and networking peripherals to its Power8 and Power9 system lineup. You can read all about it in …
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Melding System Monitoring And Capacity Planning

April 24, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

(Sponsored Content) Installing a modern system to run enterprise applications is a pretty tough task, but the job is not done once the iron is in and the databases and applications are up and running. Sophisticated organizations, whether they are large or small, do sophisticated application and system monitoring to keep an eye on how things are running, they have job schedulers that synchronize work to optimize for performance as well as drive up system utilization, and they use all of the information gathered to better plan for the kinds of systems they will need in the future …
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Guru: Why And How Not to Use The Aretha Franklin I/O Method

March 4, 2019 Ted Holt

The Aretha Franklin I/O Method is still used heavily in RPG shops even though a better method has existed for decades. In the following paragraphs, I explain the Aretha Franklin I/O Method, tell you why you should not use it, and show you the superior method.

First, let me give credit where credit is due. Although I had been using the Aretha Franklin I/O Method since my System/34 days, I never knew it by that name. Then Dan Cruikshank (now retired) of IBM informed me of this terminology. Here’s how it works:

Assume an RPG program that needs data from …
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Advice For The IBM i Shop Buying X86 Servers

October 1, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

We spend a lot of time at The Four Hundred talking about the Power Systems servers and the IBM i platform, but it we also keep a keen eye on what is going on in the rest of the IT world, particularly when it comes to alternative server hardware and transaction processing and data analytics platforms. There are many, many ways to skin the cats that are the backbone of the business.

Ok, so that was a bad metaphor. It happens. Like a line of bad code.

Anyway, it is not lost on us that somewhere around 95 percent of …
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Archive Migration A Success For County Clerk

September 12, 2018 Alex Woodie

A county clerk’s office in Illinois that relies on IBM i-based applications to keep its records straight has successfully migrated its archive from an older Ultra-Density Optical (UDO) setup to a network attached storage (NAS)-based device that utilizes newer optical technology. Best of all, the new storage solution didn’t impact response times on the IBM i server one bit.

The Madison County Circuit Clerk’s Office was up against a mandate to comply with a new State of Illinois law requiring documents in civil court proceedings to be stored electronically and to be available for real-time access. While its JANO Justice …
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Guru: Handling Constraint Violations In RPG

September 5, 2018 Paul Tuohy

Author’s Note: The contents of this article were originally published as two separate articles – Handling Constraint Violations in RPG and Handling Constraints Revisited. The content of the article has been updated for free form RPG and some of the coding enhancements that have been introduced, into RPG, since 2009.

Constraints have been around for a long time but apparently have not quite made it into every programmer’s tool kit. This is partly explained by the fact that implementing constraints in an existing application can be tricky, but it doesn’t explain why constraints are not used extensively in new …
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TEMBO Bolsters Database Modernization Kit

March 26, 2018 Alex Woodie

TEMBO Technology Lab is shipping a new release of its software designed to help IBM i shops modernize their databases for the SQL age. The South African company made mostly minor tweaks to its flagship product, dubbed AO Foundation, which should position the product to do more down the road.

Since it entered the IBM i discussion in 2012, TEMBO has been building database modernization tools and evangelizing the benefits of the SQL Query Engine (SQE) as the modern, up-to-date database engine that IBM i shops should strive to use, as opposed to the older CQE engine that used DDS …
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