On September 10 IBM announced the end of marketing of IBM i 7.2 on April 30, 2020, and the end of support for this release effective April 30, 2021.
IBM i 7.2 was released in May 2014, and by 2021 it will have had a life of 7 years.
If you have partitions running IBM i 7.2 it is time to determine if your Power server can support the newer releases 7.3 and 7.4, and if it does to start making plans upgrade to one of those newer releases.
You can read the announcement document from IBM here.
When I wrote about how it is possible to check if a subsystem is active or not someone asked me if there is a way to list all the subsystems and whether they are active or not.
Having had some time to "play" I have developed a way of doing this by combining data from the following two SQL table functions:
I can get a list of all subsystem description objects by using the OBJECT_STATISTICS table function:
One of the new additions to RPG in IBM i 7.4, and not to the equivalent TR of 7.3, was the ability to have variable length arrays.
Having read the documentation, and having had a chance to "play", my findings mean I can divide this post three sections:
Before I get started I want to show what the maximum size of an array, this number has not changed since at least IBM I 7.2 . It is not the number of elements in the array that is the limit, it is the total size of the array. The array must not exceed 16,773,104 bytes. For example, this is valid as an array of 16,773,104 elements of one character is valid.
With every new release I go through all the "What's new for this release" section of IBM's KnowledgeCenter. For IBM i 7.4 and the CL programming language there is only one addition this release: %PARMS built in function. It appears to be identical to the %PARMS built in function in RPG. It is the way to determine how many parameters have been passed to a program or procedure, and from that stop the program from erroring if too few parameters are passed.
In the past I wrote about coping with to few parameters being passed to a CL program, but the new BiF is a lot neater and easier for someone else to understand.
As I said above %PARMS is available in RPG:
The Run SQL Statements command, RUNSQLSTM, runs all of the SQL statements that are in a particular source member. I use the command a lot as I put all of my SQL statements to create Tables, Views, Indexes, and the statements to Alter them into source members, and I update the member whenever I make a change to the object. I also put miscellaneous groups of SQL statements into source members, that I can then execute whenever I want.
I use RUNSQLSTM so much I have a PDM option defined so I don't have to type in the command and all the parameters I care about.
Opt Command RS RUNSQLSTM SRCFILE(&L/&F) SRCMBR(&N) COMMIT(*NONE) ERRLVL(20) |
In the past if I ever wanted to run a CL command in one of these member I would use SQL's QCMDEXC procedure.
Video from IBM about the Power Systems and POWER9 chip.
Last week I wrote a post introducing what SQL Sequences are. Having had a chance to "play" with them some more I wanted to write about what I have discovered.
Before I go into any examples I need to have some Sequences to "play" with:
CREATE SEQUENCE MYLIB.BY_ONE START WITH 1 INCREMENT BY 1 NO MAXVALUE NO CYCLE ; CREATE SEQUENCE MYLIB.BY_TEN START WITH 10 INCREMENT BY 10 NO MAXVALUE NO CYCLE ; CREATE SEQUENCE MYLIB.BY_100 START WITH 100 INCREMENT BY 100 NO MAXVALUE NO CYCLE ; CREATE SEQUENCE MYLIB.BY_THREE START WITH 30 INCREMENT BY 3 NO MAXVALUE NO CYCLE ; |
The title sounds a bit strange, but so is the subject of this post. There is a thing in Db2 for i that I can create called a Sequence. A Sequence uses the rules I give it to return to me a sequential value I can use to update column in a table.
I am sure it will become a bit clearer when I give my example.
I have ten students who have completed taken a course. At the end of the course the students take a test. The results of this test are contained in a SQL table I created, along with their name.
I was asked was there an easy way to extract the name from the Job Name column in the Db2 for i table function ACTIVE_JOB_INFO.
The IBM i Job Name consists of three parts:
For example:
741232/SIMONH/QPADEV0001 |
The issue when extracting the name from the Job Name is it does not always start in the same position. The number is always six long, but the user profile can be any length from one to ten. This means that the name could start anywhere from the tenth to the nineteenth position in the Job Name.
