The latest Technology Refreshes for IBM i, TR2 for 7.2 and TR10 for 7.1, are available today to download. You can learn more about them from IBM's developerWorks web site here.
You can learn more about what is in these Technology Refreshes from these posts:
We have been given a number of SQL views that allow us to harvest information from our IBM i's, and many are unaware of their existance.
With the move from DDS files to SQL tables, indexes, and views I needed to update my toolset to be able to list information about the last two in a quick to run and easy to read way. Fortunately I can use some of these views to do so:
A SQL View is a virtual table. Its columns can come from one or more SQL tables or DDS files. The data in the View is not stored in its own database object. When the View is used the Select statement is executed to produce the data. You can also create, what I call, "derived" columns. The "derived" columns do not exist in the original tables/files, they are calculated when the Select statement is run.
In the examples I am going to show how I can code "derived" fields in a View to:
In my last post I wrote about how to convert DDS files to SQL DDL using the QSQGNDDL API, you can read it here, and I mentioned that in IBM i 7.2 and 7.1 TR9 there was an alternative, the GENERATE_SQL SQL procedure.
Having used both I prefer GENERATE_SQL as it is simpler to use, just one statement in STRSQL, and it has the ability to use wild cards for mass conversions. Many of its parameters are in English, which makes it easier for others to understand my code. The has six mandatory parameters:
As part of the IBM i 7.1 release IBM notified us all of their intentions not to perform any future enhance to DDS for data (physical and logical) files, and are encouraging us to migrate those files to their equivalents in SQL (tables, views, and indexes). For many of us this is an overwhelming proposition as the applications we support contain many thousands of files. To convert these by hand would take a very long time. Fortunately IBM has an API, 'Generate Data Definition Language' (QSQLGNDDL), to assist.