On June 21st 1988, IBM launched the AS/400. This was replaced in 2001 by the iSeries which, in turn, was followed by the IBM i on Power. For 30 years, IBM have managed to deliver a robust platform that delivers exceptional security and a business resilience that you can rely Read more…
I have to admit that, when trimming strings with SQL, I tend to just use the TRIM function to strip off all leading and trailing spaces. But the LTRIM and RTRIM functions really do deserve more attention because they have been recently enhanced to support trim expressions. That is, all Read more…
Division by zero is something that, sooner or later, we all have to capture. For the rest of this post, I am using a small temporary table that I have imaginatively named DIV0. It has two columns, COLUMN1 and COLUMN2 and it looks like this: COLUMN1 COLUMN2 5 0 6 Read more…
This post stems from recent conversation on the subject of prototyped parameters. I always pass parameters as read only (using the const keyword) in order to ensure that no unexpected changes in the called procedure can impact the calling procedure. With this approach, the only value you need to worry Read more…
It’s surprising how many times you need to know whether a record exists in any one of two or more tables. Traditionally, you would have to check each table individually until you either find a match or have checked every table to confirm that no match exists. Finding myself faced Read more…
Several months ago, I talked about Debugging RPG Programs in Batch and said that, before you submit your job, you should first hold the job queue. While this isn’t bad advice, exactly, it’s not what I actually do. When I am debugging a job in batch, I will submit it Read more…
I have talked about service programs in the past and, at the time, I mentioned that you need a binding source without really saying why. So, to revisit the subject, using the binding language allows you to change your service program without needing to recompile all of the programs that Read more…
Last week I mentioned the CPYTOIMPF command and how easy it makes reformatting data so that it can be handled by other platforms. Not surprisingly the IBM i makes it just as easy to handle data coming back with the CPYFRMIMPF command. Using the same files as last time, the Read more…
One of the many things that the IBM i (and its predecessors) has always been good at is exchanging data with other platforms. And one thing that often surprises me is that people often don’t realise just how easy sharing data can be. How easy? This easy CPYTOIMPF FROMFILE(MRKRPT01) TOSTMF('/home/PAUL/MarketingReport.csv') Read more…
Here’s handy: The ON-EXIT operation code begins the ON-EXIT section. The ON-EXIT section contains code that runs every time that the procedure ends, whether it ends normally or abnormally. The ON-EXIT section runs under the following conditions: The procedure reaches the end of the main part of the procedure. The Read more…