This morning Barbara Morris, lead developer for the RPG compiler, announced that the RPG PTFs for the latest Technology Refreshes, IBM i 7.5 TR5 and 7.4 TR11, are now available.
You can see what these are here.
I don't have the specific PTF numbers for RPG. You will want the latest PTFs for 5770WDS, ILE RPG compiler. Those you can download from Fix Central.
This does not appear to have been coordinated with the Db2 Database (SQL) PTFs. They show they will be available December 13, 2024.
When I opened ACS yesterday morning the following window popped up informing me of there was a new release of ACS is available:
You can either install the new version, 1.1.9.7, by clicking on the "Download Update…" button on the window displayed above. Or you can go IBM's ACS website, http://ibm.biz/IBMi_ACS (the URL is case sensitive), and download it from the website.
Don't worry if you don't have an IBMid, you can create one in a couple of minutes.
Confirm your agreement with IBM's license.
You will then be presented with the "IBM i Access Client Solutions" page. The download for ACS's latest version is the first download.
Starting in IBM i 7.4 it is possible to use CL Built in Functions, BiF, in the parameters of CL's Call command. This becomes even easier when I use the additional parameters in the Parameter parameters of the CALL command.
Those of you who have seen example of my RPG code have seen examples where I have used BiFs in its Call operation code parameters. When I learned that there was now similar functionality in CL I became very curious what could I do with it.
I chosen a number of scenarios to write examples for, as these are things I have done many times with RPG's Call operation code.
I do not think I have ever seen IBM do this before. The Vice President of Product Management for the IBM Power Servers, Bargav Balakrishnan, wrote a blog post in the IBM Newsroom about IBM Power11 processors being released next year, 2025.
While his post was not technical, explaining the differences from IBM Power10 and Power11, he did give some details about the performance improvement we could see when comparing these two servers.
He also wrote about integrating the IBM Spyre Accelerator to allow IBM Power servers used to be able the scale AI workloads.
The last section of his post talked about IBM's AI tool for RPG, RPG code assistant, stating that IBM intends to deliver it next year too.
You can read his blog post here.
This goes to show that 2025 is going to be an exciting year for IBM Power, IBM i and RPG.
On Tuesday, November 12 2024, IBM i Chief Architect and CTO, Steve Will, announced the updated "Fall 2024 IBM i Performance FAQ" guide had been published, and is available for download.
This guide gives information on how to measure the performance of your IBM i partition, and how to optimize whatever tools and programming languages you use to get the best from the operating system we all love.
You can open and download the document from here.
I have already downloaded and read this document this guide. And I think it would be good for you to do the same.
When I use RPG Update operation code I tend to use the %FIELDS Built in Function, BiF, with it. The %FIELDS allows me to list the file fields I want to update, all other are unchanged. As I like my code to be "self-documenting" I use it a lot if I am not updating all of the fields in the record, this allows other developers to learn that I was only interested in updating the fields listed.
These days almost all of my data file I/O is with SQL, which leaves me using RPG I/O with just display and printer files. I cannot update a record in a printer file, therefore, this post is exclusively about display files, and subfiles in particular.
Why do I feel the need to write about this when %FIELDS and subfiles have been around for several releases. It is because of a change that is in IBM i 7.5. In this release it is no longer possible to compile a program that uses the %FIELDS when updating a subfile without some extra work. But before I go into that let me show my example code, starting with the DDS source for the display file:
Last week I was presenting at COMMON's Navigate in Toronto, Canada, and I took the opportunity to hand out more of the RPGPGM.COM-unity ribbons. You can see who I gave them to here.
If I gave you a ribbon and I missed taking a photograph of you with it, please send me a photograph posed like the other people I photographed with their ribbons.
What is the RPGPGM.COM-unity? You will have to click on this link to learn what it means.
Have you ever wanted to know what is going on within an active SQL Query Engine, SQE, query?
If, like me, you do there is a table function that shows all kinds of interesting information.
The table function ACTIVE_QUERY_INFO has been around since IBM i 7.3 . It has four parameters that allow you to select the results you want returned.
A second data mart was introduced as part of the last round of Technology Refreshes that allows me to capture and store information about the special authorities given to user profiles in my partitions.
The Special Authority Data Mart is held in the table SPECIAL_AUTHORITY_DATA_MART, which resides in the SYSTOOLS. The table is a Materialize Query Table, MQT. This means that the contents of the table are not dynamic, changed when changes are made to the user profiles, it is refreshed using the REFRESH TABLE SQL statement. If you don't know what that is I will show how to use it in my examples below.
The most basic SQL statement to retrieve the data from the Table is:
01 SELECT * FROM SYSTOOLS.SPECIAL_AUTHORITY_DATA_MART |
The idea for this post came from a question. The questioner had a situation where, due to a mixed-up library list, someone had run the wrong version of a program from another library. They already had the program's name on their display files, and they asked was it possible to retrieve the library the current executing program is in, and add that to the their display files.
After some discussion we decided that any change would be needed in both RPG and CL programs. Fortunately, this is simple in both languages.
Before I start explaining my RPG and CL code I need to have a display file within which are fields for the program and the program's library. I created a simple display file to do this, called TESTDSPF:
01 A DSPSIZ(24 80 *DS3) 02 A R SCREEN 03 A 3 2'Program name . :' 04 A PGMNAME 10 O 3 20 05 A 4 2'Program library :' 06 A PGMLIB R O 4 20REFFLD(PGMNAME *SRC) |