Get more RPGPGM.COM in your Google Search

I get quiet few communications from readers of this website that they have bookmarked RPGPGM.COM in their browser, or they have made it their home page. I am very flattered that people appreciate my work enough to do that.

If you are someone who finds the content of this website useful, and want to have a way to list results from it more prominently in your Google search experience, Google has added a new feature to help: Google Preferred Sources.

At the time of publication this feature is available in the USA and India, for Google searches in English. I am keeping my fingers crossed that it will eventually be rolled out globally.

What does it do? This is what Google says in their blog post announcing the release of "Preferred sources":

When you select your preferred sources, you'll start to see more of their articles prominently displayed within Top Stories, when those sources have published fresh and relevant content for your search.

This is available for Desktop, Android, and iPhone and iPad.

Rather than follow the steps described in the articles to activate Preferred sources, you can just click on the button below.

You must be signed into your Google Account before clicking.

More information can be found:

• Google blog: How to select your preferred sources in Top Stories in Search
• Google Search Help: Top stories in search

Prevent my user profile being used when others submit job

It is possible to submit jobs to batch that will run for another user profile by using the User parameter in the Submit Job command, SBMJOB. For example:

SBMJOB CMD(DLTF FILE(MYLIB/INVHIST)) JOB(TEST) USER(SIMON1)

The above shows that the current job is trying to submit a job to run with the SIMON1 user profile. I would consider to be a security risk. If SIMON1 has more authority than the current user, let's say that is NOTSIMON, then NOTSIMON can submit jobs that perform tasks they are not authorized to do, or do something bad that they will not be blamed for.

Fortunately in most cases NOTSIMON would receive the message:

SBMJOB CMD(DLTF FILE(MYLIB/INVHIST)) JOB(TEST) USER(SIMON1) Not authorized to user profile SIMON1.

I have encountered various companies where all the SBMJOB commands in their programs would use a "special" user profile for batch jobs, that had more authority than the average user. In this scenario when NOTSIMON ran a program that SBMJOB, and I looked at the calling job's job log I would see something like:

Useful IBM Support document for data type mapping

Someone sent me this link to an IBM Support document that maps DDS data types to SQL and ODBC data types. And I decided to share it with you as I find this information both interesting and useful.

DDS/SQL Data Type Mappings - IBM Support

New version of ACS, 1.1.9.9, is now available

Yesterday I discovered that a new version of ACS became available for download.

Giving the ability to see all of the objects on the system

I understand why IBM i developers should not have all object authority, *ALLOBJ, but at times I am frustrated by my inability to find objects in my partition. I do not want to do anything to them, just know that they exist. I have to find someone with a security office equivalent user profile and ask them to do a search for me.

I have found a way that this frustration can be removed. It will work on all partitions that are IBM i 7.5 or higher. I think what I am going to describe is included in the initial release. As none of the partition I have access to are running just base 7.5 I cannot check that this did not come in a Technology Refresh, TR.

Function Usages are way to be granted access to perform certain higher authorization functions, without being given that higher authorization. I was going through IBM's documentation about them when I came across: