• DB2 For i Support Now Offered by Rimini Street

  June 26, 2017 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops now have another option for obtaining technical support and maintenance services in support their DB2 for i environment: Rimini Street. And in some cases, owing to the uniquely integrated nature of this platform, the vendor will even provide support for the IBM i operating system as well.

  Earlier this month, the Las Vegas, Nevada, company announced that it’s now offering third-party support services for all three versions of IBM‘s DB2 database – DB2 for i, DB2 for z/OS, and DB2 for Linux, Unix, and Windows (a.k.a. “Cousin LUWy”), in addition to the SQL Server database from …

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• Rocketing Ahead With An API Engine

  June 26, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The history of computing is governed by a plethora of opposing forces, with the polar opposites interweaving and interleaving to create more general trends that undulate and cause the waves we ride on top of or get swamped by. There is a tendency toward abstraction and the desire to get closer to the iron to wring the absolute most performance out of a specific system, for instance. Humans don’t think in binary or assembler – well most humans don’t but there are always a few genius weirdos – so the speed of execution is sacrificed for the speed of the …

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• Guru: Storing Images In An SQL Table, Part 1

  June 26, 2017 Mike Larsen

  In the first part of this series, we’ll look at how we can store images (or other media) in an SQL table on the IBM i. To accomplish this goal, we’ll write an RPG program that reads a table that has the name and location of the images from a folder in the IFS, and writes those images to a table.

  The images will be stored in a column that is defined as a BLOB data type. ‘BLOB’ stands for ‘Binary Large Object’, and is a collection of binary data that is stored as a single entity in a database. …

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• Guru: Common Table Expressions Can Replace Query Chains

  June 5, 2017 Ted Holt

  Modernization efforts often concentrate on the database and programs. That is well and good, but there is more to modernization. Replacing Query for IBM i with more modern query tools is also important. But what do you do with those queries that people depend on? More confusing, what do you do with query chains?

  A query chain is a series of queries that run one after another, consolidating and reformatting data in temporary physical files, in order to produce a resulting data set, often in report form. It’s not unusual to see small CL programs like the following one:

  PGM
  

  …

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• Top Ten New IBM i RFEs

  May 22, 2017 Alex Woodie

  Should IBM open source its database drivers, or add support for .NET? Should it add the latest SSL ciphers to IBM i 7.1? These are some of the changes that it has received through its new Web-based requests for enhancement (RFE) program on its developerWorks site.

  The new RFE functionality is only a few months old, but it’s already attracting the attention of IBM i professionals who want IBM to change things about the stack. It’s also getting attention from other IBM i pros who get to vote on them.

  Here are the top ten RFEs so far, ranked by …

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• Guru: How To Cancel A Bad SQL Update

  May 15, 2017 Ted Holt

  In Three Ways To Manage Unmatched Data I wrote about the use of the RAISE_ERROR function to force a SELECT statement to cancel when unmatched data is considered a fatal error. Another good use of RAISE_ERROR is to force an UPDATE statement to cancel when an invalid condition occurs.

  To illustrate, imagine that you and I work in a factory. All factories have inventory. The people we serve purchase some inventory items and manufacture others. Our job is to write a program that will allow certain people to zero out the inventory balance for certain types of purchased items.

  The …

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• Guru: The Three Ways to Insert

  May 8, 2017 Ted Holt

  The INSERT statement is THE (as in the only) SQL way to add new data to a relational database table. At the risk of sounding like a GEICO commercial, “Everybody knows that.” Well, did you know that the INSERT statement supports three distinct ways to add new rows to a table?

  To illustrate the three forms of INSERT, imagine that you and I work for a small company that stores goods in, and ships goods from, a warehouse. Since the company has only one warehouse, there has never been a need for a warehouse ID column in any of …

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• Guru: SQL Table Functions Can Do Non-function Things

  May 1, 2017 Ted Holt

  We IBM i developers owe a great debt to Scott Forstie. He’s responsible for the wonderful DB2 for i Services and IBM i Services, which give us SQL interfaces for many functions of the operating system. Like IBM, we can write SQL interfaces to help us with non-database tasks. I recently did exactly that.

  While I can’t say that I never use the Start SQL Interactive Session (STRSQL) command, I can say that I prefer to use GUI SQL clients, in particular the Run SQL Scripts utility that is part of IBM i Access Client Solutions (ACS). I do get …

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• Guru: Three Ways To Manage Unmatched Data

  April 24, 2017 Ted Holt

  Heaven forbid that I would ignore a failed RPG CHAIN (random read) operation. I always take appropriate action. Which action I take depends on the situation. The same applies to outer joins that don’t find matching data in a secondary table. Here are three ways to deal with unmatched data in an outer join using SQL.

  To illustrate, let’s use three tables from an overly simplified general ledger system. The first is a table of departments into which the business is divided. The second is a chart of accounts. The third is a transaction file that feeds the general ledger. …

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• SQL To The Rescue

  April 10, 2017 Bob Cozzi

  Since the early 1990s, developers have been using SQL embedded in RPG as a way to retrieve just the right data for the task at hand. Certainly it was at least a decade before it became commonplace to see SQL embedded in RPG, but now, 15 years later, it is in fact the go-to method for data access, or at least you can see it from here.

  I was an early adopter of SQL, but an off-again, on-again user of embedded SQL. Originally, I felt the first format RPG with quasi-free format SQL (and all those plus signs to continue …

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