SQL Archives - Page 31 of 36

Guru: Getting the Message, Part 2

August 29, 2018 Paul Tuohy

Author’s Note: This article was originally published in October 2009. Since then, I have worked on many modernization projects with many clients and, in every one of those projects, we have used some form of the contents of this (and the following) article. 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. The original articles also showed examples of direct calls to RPG subprocedures from PHP. Given that we now have many languages (Node.js, Python etc.) that interact with RPG, I changed the mechanism …
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Guru: Make It Easy On Someone Else

August 20, 2018 Ted Holt

“Make it easy on yourself,” warbled Dionne Warwick when I was just a pup. That may be good advice when severing a romantic relationship, but not when programming computers. Instead of making it easy on ourselves, we who develop and support applications need to make it easy on the people we serve.

Recently I worked on a project in which users had to enter time values into various Web pages. The original specifications stated that users would enter time values in a format we commonly use in the United States: two-digit hour, a colon, two-digit minute, a space, …
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Latest IBM i TRs To Ship Next Month

August 15, 2018 Alex Woodie

IBM unveiled a pair of out-of-bound technology refreshes (TRs) for the IBM i operating system last week. In addition to supporting the new Power Systems E980 server, IBM i 7.3 TR5 and 7.2 TR9 bring a set of enhancements to the platform’s database, development tools, and the administrative interface.

The IBM i installed base has grown accustomed to seeing operating system updates in the spring and the fall. This twice-a-year pattern has been with us, more or less, since IBM shifted to the TR approach several years ago. But IBM broke with that tradition last week when it announced that …
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Guru: Getting The Message, Part 1

August 1, 2018 Paul Tuohy

Author’s Note: This article was originally published in October 2009. Since then I have worked on many modernization projects with many clients and, in every one of those projects, we have used some form of the contents of this (and the following) article. 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 the original publication of this piece.

When we look at modernizing applications (or writing new applications) one of the basic principles is to tier the application — i.e., separate the interface — …
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More Transparency Needed For Open Source Running on IBM i

July 25, 2018 Alex Woodie

Open source may be the future of IBM i. It certainly seems that way at the moment. But if open source is going to soar to new heights on the platform, it will need better integration with the existing processes in place to monitor and manage the platform.

That’s the opinion of JK Grafe, the CEO of Quad Nova Group, a Jacksonville, Florida-based IBM i consultancy that has offices up the Eastern Seaboard. By Grafe’s own admission, open source is a great thing for the platform. But the difficulty in seeing what’s actually going on with open source workloads …
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PTC Refines Handling Of IBM i Database Logic

July 18, 2018 Alex Woodie

More organizations are moving business logic from RPG and COBOL programs into the DB2 for i database, which most community members agree is a good thing. The IBM i server’s core strength is its integrated a database, after all. However, when business logic moves into the database, it requires customers to rethink how they’re managing the code, which is a mantle that PTC has taken up with its Implementer software change management (SCM) tool.

When it comes to application modernization, fancy HTML5 screens and mobile apps usually grab the spotlight. We’re often moved by the things we can see, and …
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Trinity Guard Gives Audit Tool A Friendly GUI

June 25, 2018 Alex Woodie

IT professionals who are tired of using 5250 greenscreens to manually conduct regulatory audits of their IBM i systems may be interested in a colorful piece of software from Trinity Guard. The company recently launched TGCentral, which is a unified HTML interface designed to simplify the configuration and execution of security and regulatory audits across multiple IBM i servers.

As the spiritual and intellectual successor to PentaSafe, Trinity Guard understands how beloved those old PentaSafe products were. Even though NetIQ/Attachmate/Micro Focus has not added any new features to its IBM i security suite for over a decade, there were …
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Guru: Table Value Constructors Build Tables On The Fly

June 25, 2018 Ted Holt

Because I wish to be as valuable and productive as possible to the people who pay me to program their computers, I continually search the Web for new ideas and techniques. Doing so often leads me to sites that cater to other computing platforms. Today I want to share with you some SQL techniques that I learned from Microsoft SQL Server professionals.

These techniques are based on the Table Value Constructor (TVC), which is a group of data values, usually literals, organized into rows and columns. In its simplest form, a table value constructor is literal tabular data that is …
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Guru: DB2 For i XML Composition And The IFS

June 11, 2018 Michael Sansoterra

Hey, Mike! Regarding Composing An XML Document From Relational Data, Part 1, I have built an XML document using DB2 and i. When I run the query, I get a worthless result set. How do I use the SQL XML functions to get a usable XML file?

This question comes from reader RA, and he doesn’t exaggerate. The result set from his XML-based query looks like this:
```
....+....1....+....2....+....3....+....4....+
************Beginning of data************** 

XMLDATA 
-------- 
#CGULIB#

  1 RECORD(S) SELECTED.

 ************End of Data********************
```
Notice that DB2 for i does nothing to make the XML attractive to human eyes as the entire XML …
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Guru: Refactoring into Routines

May 7, 2018 Ted Holt

In RDi and Refactoring, I illustrated the process of refactoring by taking code of a very old style and converting it little by little into something modern. I promised to write more about the subject, and today I fulfill that promise.

The things I did in that first article — removing indicators, removing the COMP op code, removing GOTO, and renaming variables — are great, but they are not the only refactoring techniques. One of the best ways to refactor is to create new routines or improve existing routines, especially routines that can stand alone.

To illustrate, I’ll begin …
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