• Guru: Alternate SQL Row-Selection Criteria Revisited

  February 24, 2020 Ted Holt

  At the RPG & DB2 Summit last October, I chanced to overhear Rob Bestgen of IBM telling Paul Tuohy of System i Developer about a practice that he and others in IBM Lab Services had seen, a practice which they found horrifying. “Oh, no!” I thought. “I’ve written about that for itjungle.com!” Are you ready to be horrified?

  Rob was telling Paul that they have seen SQL queries in which portions of the WHERE clause are enabled or disabled through the use of switches. I did not invent this technique — I realized more than a few years ago that …

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• Guru: ACS 1.1.8.3 Content Assist Includes Prompt For SQL!

  February 10, 2020 Birgitta Hauser

  STRSQL, the green-screen facility for executing SQL Statements, has had its days. Nevertheless, many SQL users still prefer this legacy interface over the Access Client Solutions (ACS) Run SQL Scripts facility. Others use third-party tools to execute SQL statements. The common excuse has been that the Run SQL Script facility does not include a way to prompt SQL commands, tables, and columns. In ACS version 1.1.8.3, Content Assist includes prompting for SQL statements.

  Before ACS Version 1.1.8.3, no prompting was available within the Run SQL Scripts Facility. To access tables, views or materialized query tables (MQTs), we needed to know …

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• Guru Classic: Find a View of a View of a View. . .

  February 5, 2020 Paul Tuohy

  Author’s Note: This article was originally published in October 2014. This stored procedure is something I use a lot and has saved me from accidentally deleting dependent views more than once. Basically, I call it before I ever drop a view.

  SQLs Data Definition Language (DDL) offers many great features, one of which is the ability to define a view of a view. This can lead to simple or complex structures making use of views of views of views of . . . you get the idea.

  But one of the difficulties with this technique is that, once created, it …

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• Guru: Copy OUTQ To PDF

  February 3, 2020 Bob Cozzi

  A long time ago I created a CL command named Copy from OUTQ (CPYOUTQ). This command allowed you to selectively copy spooled files from one OUTQ to either another OUTQ or to the IFS as a PDF or text file. My customers use it all the time for monthly archiving of spooled files and redistribution of output. You may have it on your own system.

  Being one of the handful of original advocates for the so called “Openness APIs” for IBM OS/400 (now IBM i), I quickly embraced the system APIs and have used them extensively throughout the decades. One …

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• Guru: SQL Functions Can Do Non-function Things

  January 27, 2020 Ted Holt

  We all know that the SQL SELECT statement only retrieves data, right? If you want to modify data, you have to use INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, or MERGE, correct? Well, to quote the great George Gershwin, It Ain’t Necessarily So. You can modify data from a SELECT statement, and maybe sometimes you should. Here’s how it’s done.

  I’ll illustrate with a SELECT statement that will run the Reorganize Physical File (RGZPFM) command over physical files that have at least 10 percent deleted records. I could do this with plain ol’ CL, of course, and that’s probably the approach I would …

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• Industry Speaks: IBM i Predictions for 2020, Part 1

  January 20, 2020 Alex Woodie

  We are three weeks into 2020, and that New Year smell hasn’t worn off yet. As time rolls on, the IBM i community will certainly get down to business. In the meantime, here are industry predictions from nine community members to read.

  For Alan Seiden, the CEO of Seiden Group and an IBM Champion for Power, risk management will be a common theme for how they approach IT staffing in 2020.

  “IBM i shops have traditionally operated in a lean manner, relying on key individuals who knew their systems intimately,” Seiden says. “Now, with IT staff managing more projects than …

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• Update On Migration Of developerWorks Content

  January 15, 2020 Alex Woodie

  On New Year’s Day, IBM fulfilled its promise to turn off the developerWorks Connections website, which hosted technical content posted by members of the IBM i community. But before it hit the “delete” button, Big Blue worked with content owners to migrate the most active content to other websites, to redirect browser traffic, and to archive the rest.

  IBM made good on its previous promise to ensure that no content was left behind when it permanently shuttered the popular developerWorks Connections website. It was forced to make that promise after it caused an uproar in October, when it announced that …

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• Guru: Formatting Numbers and Dates/Times/Timestamps in SQL

  January 13, 2020 Paul Tuohy

  In this article, I want to share with you an SQL scalar function that I happen to have been using quite a bit recently. At times, when using an SQL select statement, you may want to format a number or date. Something along the same lines as using the %EDITC or %EDITW built in functions in RPG or the EDTCDE or EDTWRD keywords in DDS. In SQL we can use the VARCHAR_FORMAT or TO_CHAR (they are synonyms for each other – both work exactly the same way) scalar function to provide similar functionality.

  Since they are synonyms for each other, …

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• Guru Classic: Don’t Ignore the View

  January 8, 2020 Paul Tuohy

  Author’s Note: This article was originally published in April 2009. The use of DDL and embedded SQL have come a long way since then but the basic premise of the article still applies. I have removed the embedded SQL example using a SELECT * since this is a style that I no longer recommend (from the point of view of self-documenting code, possible performance gains and breaking old habits of thinking in records). I also changed the example of reformatting a numeric date column to use a DATES table as opposed to functions (a faster and better approach). I removed …

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• 2019: An IBM i Year To Review

  December 16, 2019 Alex Woodie

  And. . . stop! Put down your pencils, class. The test is over. We have made it through another year. Well, okay, we have almost made it through most of this year. But with just two weeks left, now is the time to wrap it all up and revisit the biggest IBM i stories to make news in the year that was 2019.

  It all started back in January, when…

  IBM jacked up the prices on IBM Lab Services engagements by more than 10 percent. Whereas it used to cost $3,125 per day to have the benefit of an IBM …

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