Happy 8th birthday!

Wow! Another year has passed and RPGPGM.COM celebrates its eighth birthday today. I know I act surprised every year, I do so for two reasons:

1. I cannot believe that another year has passed!
2. There is more interesting IBM i stuff I have not written about yet

Despite lockdowns and COVID I have an exciting year:

I was very pleasantly surprised and honored to be recognized as an IBM Champion for the Power platform this year.

The RPGPGM.COM headquarters relocated from Southern California to Central Texas.

Founded the Central Texas IBM i User Group.

Presented nine times to various IBM i users groups in Europe and North America, including at COMMON's NAViGATE conference last month.

If you are involved with a local IBM i user group, anywhere in the world, and would be interested in my presenting to your group use the Contact Form, on the right, to message me. In a world of online meetings, distance is not a problem.

Every year I like to give my favorite posts of the past 12 months:

• Deleting spool files using SQL
• Using Navigator for i for SQL index suggestions
• Getting the day of the week in a CL program using SQL
• Range test added to RPG
• Reading a file in the IFS with SQL
• Writing to an IFS file with SQL
• Stop SQL DROP statement object not found error
• Check if submitted job is still on job queue

I try to pick just five, but always find more I think are worthy of including in this list.

I need to thank y'all (I can use that as I am now in Texas) for taking the time to read my work.

A special thank you to all of you who took the time to send me your feedback and encouragement, it has been the "fuel" that has kept me writing.

I need to say "vielen Dank" to RZKH for allowing me to use their IBM i partitions, and being responsive to my request to load and apply the latest PTFs.

Thank you to the advertizers. Without you I would not be able to run this web site and create the content it contains.

Well, that's it for this year. Onward into the ninth year for this blog. I wonder what exciting things the next 12 months will bring?

 

For those of you who know me you will know I am a bit of Geography geek. I have not done this for a few years: I wanted to know which countries in the world had visited this blog. There are so many it is easier to list the countries that have not:

• Central African Republic (Africa)
• Comoros (Africa)
• Djibouti (Africa)
• Equatorial Guinea (Africa)
• Eritrea (Africa)
• Kiribati (Oceania)
• North Korea (Asia)
• South Sudan (Africa)
• Tonga (Oceania)
• Tuvalu (Oceania)