Today at the Common User group meeting at Disneyland new Technology Refreshes were announced:
No details yet, but there are pages on IBM's website for both Refreshes:
As soon as I learn more about these I will publish it here on this blog.
Steve Will's, IBM i Chief Architect, presentation on what is in IBM i 7.2 TR2 is ongoing at the Common meeting. He has given us a taste of what is to come in a blog post here.
There are times when an error is encountered in a program, particularly one that is running in batch, which I do not want to "error out" with a message. I want to cope with the error within the program, flag that there was an error so that I can resolve the issue later, and continue processing. If I can generate a program dump when the error occurs I have all the information I need to be able to fix it. CL's DMPCLPGM command and RPG's DUMP operation code do that without the need to break for an error message, producing the same output as if I had answered an error message with an option "D".
I am surprised at the number of IBM i developers who are unaware that it is possible to produce a dump without an error message. I would prefer to cope with errors and produce a dump within a program rather than receiving a 2 AM phone call from the night operator telling me that there is an error that is holding everything else up, and what am I going to do about it?
This is a video of the presentation Tim Rowe, Business Architect for application development on IBM i, made to Common Europe:
Previously IBM had announced that support for the IBM i 6.1 and 6.1.1 versions of their operating system would end on September 30, 2015. On April 14 they announced a "service extension for IBM I V6R1":
IBM Software Support Services - service extension for IBM i V6R1 provides support for usage questions, problem determination assistance, and support for new fixes. With this service, IBM product specialists can help you simplify management of your IBM i 6.1 operating system as well as resolve issues more quickly and efficiently when they do happen, thereby minimizing risk of business disruption.
In a comment submitted to last week's post, blocking fetches to get more than one row at a time, Karl Hanson informed me of a way to retrieve how many rows were fetched by the "Fetch number of rows" statement. This way can also be used to retrieve how many rows/records were inserted, fetched, updated, and deleted.
Stories from IBM i customers explaining how they are delivering high quality services faster and for less money.
In an earlier post I described how to perform "record level access" using SQL, i.e. getting data from a table or file one row or record at a time, much like reading a file using RPG. But you can do more with SQL by using blocking fetches, getting a number of rows/records at once. As database I/O is a relative slow process, by using block fetching decreases the number of I/Os needed and this can make your programs faster.
The difference between using the FETCH NEXT for one row/record at a time versus the blocking fetch is adding the FOR x ROWS to the fetch statement:
Qshell is a command interface for the IBM i's POSIX environment. I have found it most useful for its ease of use when using the IFS, Integrate File System, and interfacing data between the traditional IBM i environment and the IFS.
The Qshell command I use the most is db2, I have Paul Wren to thank for introducing me to it. The db2 Qshell command uses the SQL CLI, Call Level Interface, and allows me to run SQL commands on files in the IBM i and IFS environments. I am not suggesting that this will replace the STRSQL, RUNSQL, and RUNSQLSMT commands, Query Management queries (*QMQRY), and SQL embedded in RPG. Think of learning how to use db2 in Qshell as another asset to add to your IBM i knowledge and skill set.
This is a recording of a presentation Steve Will, chief architect of the IBM i, made to COMMON Europe yesterday (March 27 2015).
It contains a lot of interesting information about the present and the future of the IBM i operating system.
If you do not want to watch the whole video Steve Will also wrote a blog post about this on his blog that covers the same points, although not in the same detail. You can read it here.
This video from IBM explains the history of their Redbooks.
You can find the IBM i/PowerSystems specific Redbooks here.
The cycle is still a part of RPG, and while you are not using it in your RPG programs it is still there lurking. I have always wished there was a way to be able to turn it off, and allow RPG to be linear. In recent releases this has started to happen.
With the file definitions in all free RPG it is not possible to code a file as primary or secondary, or to define matching records and level break indicators. But the cycle is still there. For example, the program below uses the cycle to read all the records from a file:
IBM i 7.2 introduced a number of new built in functions, BIFs, to CL. One of them is %CHAR, convert to character format. When I found it my first thought was this the same as the RPG %CHAR BIF.
The syntax for the two BIFs is similar:
CL : CHGVAR VAR(&ALPHA) VALUE(%CHAR(&NBR))RPG : Alpha = %char(Nbr) ; |