• Guru Classic: Triggers – Allow Repeated Change

  February 13, 2019 Paul Tuohy

  Author’s Note: This article was originally published in November 2013. This has always been one of my favorite techniques for data modernization. I only wish I had thought of it back in the days of Y2K! 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 2013. 

  Recently, during a modernization project, I have been making use of the Allow Repeated Change (ALWREPCHG) option with before triggers. ALWREPCHG allows a before trigger to make changes to the record being inserted or updated, and that lets …

  Read more

• Guru: Open Access To The Rescue

  February 11, 2019 Jon Paris

  Recently I came upon a couple of questions on internet lists asking for an easy method to create flat files in the IFS. Not CSV files, but rather simple text files where individual data items are in fixed character positions. Various somewhat convoluted solutions were offered to the requestors, but to me this problem shouted “Open Access!”

  So, I set about quickly building an Open Access (OA) handler to perform the task. I find OA really useful for this kind of job because, once the handler is written, creating these kinds of files in the future become a trivial task, …

  Read more

• More IBM i Predictions For 2019

  February 6, 2019 Alex Woodie

  We kicked off our 2019 soothsaying last week with predictions from IBM i leaders on what the New Year will bring. We keep the ball rolling this week with another batch of predictions from our friends around the IBM i community.

  According to Alison Butterill, IBM‘s the program director for offering management for IBM i, the platform will build off the momentum generated with last year’s 30th anniversary celebrant.

  “The excitement begun in 2018 as we highlighted client innovation around the world will continue into 2019,” Butterill says. “The momentum continues to grow as clients are looking at ways …

  Read more

• Inside The Latest ALL400s Report

  February 6, 2019 Alex Woodie

  In early 2018, John Rockwell started a survey from his ALL400s website in an attempt to glean more information about the state of midrange community. Many of the questions are about which products IBM i professionals use, but the survey also digs into other aspects of the relationships that people and organizations have with the platform, including plans to migrate off IBM i.

  According to the latest ALL400s survey of the midrange community, more IBM i shops say they have no plans to move off the platform. It was a small increase — from 57.5 percent last April who said …

  Read more

• IBM i Has Been Getting With The Program For Years

  February 4, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There are many things that one could constructively criticize IBM about when it comes to the Power Systems platform running the IBM i operating system. But, in recent years at least, one of those things would not be – and could not be – that the company has not done enough to embrace the most important elements of the modern programming toolbox.

  In fact, the company has done and increasingly good job of embracing and extending the compilers, interpreters, frameworks, and models of the programming languages that have gone mainstream since Java first took the stage at the beginning of …

  Read more

• One Repository To Rule The Source – And Object – Code

  February 4, 2019 Floyd Del Muro

  (Sponsored Content) The concept of a single repository for source is not necessarily a new one. When I interviewed with ARCAD back in 2011, I did so at the at the Rational conference called Innovate in Orlando. The research and development team and our chief technology officer were already in dialogue with IBM to resell ARCAD technology alongside its Rational development suite, adding power to Rational Team Concert that development organizations could effectively have a similar repository for IBM i and open source applications.

  At the time, RTC supported the open source world very well, just like Git …

  Read more

• Guru: Create A UDTF Wrapper For A Stored Procedure Result Set

  February 4, 2019 Michael Sansoterra

  In the tip, Arranging Query Logic in DB2 for i Routines, I addressed a reader’s question about how to create a user-defined table function (UDTF) in DB2 for i that would return the same result set as an existing stored procedure. The purpose of having the UDTF would be to do additional processing on a result set, such as joining the result set with another query or dumping the result set to a temporary table for analysis. To accomplish this, I suggested moving the stored procedure query logic into a UDTF and then replace the query within the stored …

  Read more

• Taking A Fresche Approach To IBM i-Watson Education

  February 4, 2019 Alex Woodie

  There is a big data analytics revolution taking place that threatens to separate the AI haves from the have-nots. Companies that run the IBM i server want to get in on the analytics action just like everybody else, but AI discussions often stray away from IBM i. Now Fresche Solutions is working to close that disconnect with a series of educational courses centered squarely on the intersection of IBM i and Watson.

  Last year, Fresche Solutions worked with IBM last year to put together a series of onsite training seminars aimed at giving IBM i professionals the educational tools they …

  Read more

• Guru: Speed Up Command-Line PHP

  January 21, 2019 Alan Seiden

  While PHP runs quickly via the Apache web server, command-line PHP scripts (run from PASE directly or via CL or RPG) have a lag on start-up. In this article, I show how to speed up PHP when called from the command line (known as PHP-CLI).

  Why does PHP-CLI (command line PHP) have a slow start-up? While several reasons are often given, I’ve found the culprit to be the loading of PHP extensions that are enabled by php.ini and other configuration files of Zend Server. Examples of extensions are ibm_db2, simplexml, and Zend’s proprietary components.

  Within a normal web server environment, …

  Read more

• Guru Classic: Automatic Or Static Storage?

  January 16, 2019 Susan Gantner

  Author’s Note: This tip was first published in August 2008. One thing that has changed in the intervening 10-plus years is that I find a lot more RPGers regularly using subprocedures now. Something that hasn’t really changed much is that many of those using subprocedures still don’t fully understand the behavioral differences between automatic and static storage. The concepts and handling of automatic versus static storage haven’t really changed. So the only modifications I’ve made for this reprise of the tip is to update the style of the code example.

  If you write RPG subprocedures, you should know about the …

  Read more

Previous Articles Next Articles