EoS for 7.4 announced

What I have been predicting for a while happened on Tuesday September 16, 2025. IBM announced that the end of standard support for IBM i 7.4 will occur on September 30, 2026.

After that date support for this release will only be offered as a Service Extension. In the past the Service Extension is offered at twice the cost of standard support.

If you have Power9, Power10, or Power11 you can upgrade your IBM i release to the two remaining supported releases: 7.5 and 7.6 .

If you have a Power8, 7.4 is the last release that can be run on that server. You will need to upgrade to a later Power server, Power11, to be able to upgrade to one of the newer releases.

IBM's announcement for the Withdrawal from marketing and change in service level: IBM i 7.4.

IBM's document of the IBM Power systems and the IBM i releases they can run.

Extracting the same data from multiple spool files with SQL

The idea for this post came from a question I was asked. There were a number of program dump spool files, QPGMDMP, and the manager wanted to know what was the value in a same variable from all of the spool files. While others said there was no alternative than to browse each spool file for the information. I knew there was a better way using SQL.

In these examples I am not using program dump spool files as you would be unable to replicate what I am going to show. Therefore, I am using the output from the Work Output Queue command, WRKOUTQ, with it outputting to a spool file:

01 WRKOUTQ OUTPUT(*PRINT)

Forta survey

Today, September 15, Fortra's thirteenth annual "IBM i Marketplace Survey" starts.

IMHO it is important for all of us, no matter where we are in the world, to take part. The results of this survey gives a "snap shot" of what is important to the IBM i community. You will often see IBM-ers quoting the results of the survey too.

The survey is open September 15 – October 31, with the results being published in January 2026.

Please take the time to participate in the survey.

Click here to take part.

Click here to see the results of last year's survey.

Calculating the remainder using SQL

I had a scenario where I needed to determine the remainder value following a division operation for all the rows in a SQL Table. Rather than performing the calculation myself to determine the remainder there is a SQL scalar function that will return it for me, its name is MOD.

IBM's documentation for MOD states that it "divides the first argument by the second argument and returns the remainder". Its syntax is just:

MOD( < dividend value or variable > , < divisor value or variable > )

For example:

01 VALUES MOD(9, 2)

RPGPGM.COM-unity i Norge

Last week I was fortunate to be in Oslo, Norway, for COMMON Norge's "Professional day". I took this opportunity to hand out some of the the "RPGPGM.COM-unity" ribbons. You can see who I gave them to here.

Norway is the fifth country I have handed ribbons out to. It is wonderful to see how the community is expanding to different areas of the world.

What is the RPGPGM.COM-unity? You will have to click on this link to learn about it.

Another way to check if file exists in IFS

In June I wrote about how to use SQL to check if a file existed in the IFS. I received a communication from Rich Diedrich offering an alternative, using the access C procedure. I have taken his code and developed it into this example.

I created an external procedure that I made into a service program to perform the checking, and then wrote a small RPG program to call it to validate if certain files exist.

I am going to start by showing the source code for the external procedure, which resides in a module I called TESTMOD1.

CVTDAT can use 1970 rule

This almost slipped past me, the information in the IBM i 7.6 documentation that says that the Convert Date command, CVTDAT can use the '1970 rule'.

Whether CVTDAT uses the '1940 rule' or the '1970 rule' depends upon the presence of the QIBM_QBASEYEAR Environment variable. If its value is '1970' that rule is used, if it is not present then the '1940 rule' is used.

How can I tell if I have that Environment variable? There are two ways. I can use the Work with Environment Variables command, WRKENVVAR:

01 WRKENVVAR

Additions to the SYSDISKSTAT

SYSDISKSTAT returns the information about disk and solid-state drives, SSD. It comes in two forms:

• SYSDISKSTAT View
• SYSDISKSTAT Table function

I am not going to say much more about using these two as I gave a lot of detail when they were first introduced.

In the latest release IBM i 7.6 and 7.5 TR6 two new columns have been added to both of the SYSDISKSTAT:

Identifying and changing object owners

Before I delete an user profile I always want to identify which objects it owns, and then transfer them to another profile or profiles. I can see which objects they own using the Work with Object by Owner command, WRKOBJOWN. If there are a lot of objects in the results I do not find this user interface helpful.

Db2 for i offers us an alternative, the OBJECT_OWNERSHIP table function. I have written about the OBJECT_OWNERSHIP view before, it would appear I overlooked the table function.

The advantage of using a table function is that only the results for the parameters passed are found, like calling an API. With a view the rows are selected according to the selection criteria, which is like searching a file or table. In various situations, one may have an have advantages over the other. In this scenario, I only want the information for one user profile, the table function is more efficient.

The syntax for the OBJECT_OWNERSHIP is simple, as it only needs one parameter passed to it, the user profile:

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