July's presentations

July is the month of OCEAN’s TechCon 2026. TechCon is one of my favorite events of the year, and it is the IBM i event of the year in the western United States. The event consists of two days, a virtual day, Thursday July 23, and an in-person one, Friday July 24. I have been asked to speak on the Friday, and will be giving four presentations.

If you want to learn more about the "best in the west" you can check out the TechCon website to see who else is presenting, and register here.

Earlier in the month, Tuesday July 14, I will be virtually visiting with the IBM i Midwest User Group, iMWUG, to make two presentations about things to make tracking changes to your database easier.

You can register by clicking on the link on this page.

Later the same evening, Tuesday July 14, the Central Texas IBM i User Group, will be hearing from IBM Champion Gregory Simmons, who will be debuting a brand-new presentation to us, about using the three-part name in SQL. Come and learn what this is, and how you can use it.

The event is online, free, and you can register here.

I hope to see you at one of these events.

Retrieving the value of a column from a previous row

I was sent a copy of a job log from weeks ago, and had been asked to identify which parts of the job had run the longest. Fortunately, the spool file of the job log was still available so I could do some SQL magic to extract useful information from it. The first thing I want to do is to determine is how long each program or command took. I can extract the timestamp from the spool file, but I need to be able to retrieve the timestamp for the previous entry too. How can I retrieve that information for the previous entry?

After a bit of searching I found a SQL function that would allow me to do this. Rather than go straight into showing what I did with the joblog spool file, I am going to start with a simpler example. I have a DDL table, TESTTABLE, that has a decimal column, TEST_NUMBER, and nine rows of data. I can show the data using the following SQL statement:

01 SELECT TEST_NUMBER 02 FROM TESTTABLE

Which returns: