After all of yesterday’s excitement with the announcement of a new release of IBM i 7.4, and a Technology Refresh for 7.3 TR6, I have had a chance to review the documentation and these are the things that caught my eye:
The links below are to the relevant pages in the KnowledgeCenter.
I went through and picked out what I thought be my favorites here
Today is announcement day as IBM has announced a new release of IBM i, 7.4, and a new Technology Refresh for IBM i 7.3 .
Since my first post this is what I have found:
The new release, 7.4, will only be supported on the PowerSystem servers with the Power8 and Power9 processors.
The availability dates for these are:
Someone asked me if there was a way, using SQL, to determine the size of a library?
This is a trick question as few people realize that the size of a library and the total size of all the objects within are different.
The questioner clarified that they wanted to know the total size of all of the objects in the library. But I gave him examples showing the difference between the two.
He was using the Display Library command, DSPLIB and was trying to find a way to get the same total from this command in a way it could be retrieved programmatically.
In the days before all the cool Db2 for i views, table functions, etc. I would have used the Display Object Description command, DSPOBJD. To get the size of the library I would have used the following:
This post is about an API I stumbled across when looking for another. The Syntax Check SQL Statement API, QSQCHKS, will validate any SQL statement passed to it. I can see this being useful when I build a SQL statement in a variable before executing it. If I was to validate the statement it would allow me identify any errors I may have made.
When I show my code, below, you might think it looks complicated, with several strangely names data structures, which is why I have placed it in its own procedure with just one parameter passed to it and one returned. K.I.S.S. .
I have created two procedures to achieve my goal: to return a character variable containing the SQL error message's text. To this end I have created two procedures, the first in RPG, the second in CL. I could have combined them into a single service program, but as this is an example I left them as modules, RPGMOD001 and CLMOD001, to be bound to the calling program at program creation (compile) time.
In previous posts I have written about using FTP to copy files from one IBM i partition to another. Almost all of the examples I gave were for transferring of a file, or files, in what I call the "IBM i environment", good old libraries and files.
Earlier this week one of my colleagues came to me and asked if there was a way to use FTP to copy a file in the IFS of one IBM i to the IFS of another partition. I looked back at the posts I had written and realized that I did not have a good example of how to do this. I thought I would share what we played with so he could understand what to do.
Before we get started I need to explain that FTP with IBM i has two naming conventions for the file's path: