Understanding journals and how to use them
The journal records every change to your data, with the time and the name of who made it. It exists for recovery, but day to day it mostly answers one question: who changed this record?
Articles on IBM i and AS/400 — 22 articles
Integrating IBM i with REST services
Calling an external API from an RPG program needs no extra software and no rewrite: it can be done in SQL, in a few lines. The available routes, and when each one makes sense.
Object security on IBM i
Many installations run on users who hold *ALLOBJ because "otherwise it does not work". How you end up there, and how to get out without stopping anybody's work.
Backup and recovery: a practical guide
Saving is the easy part. This guide starts from the question that actually matters: if the machine does not come back tomorrow morning, what do you restart from, and how long does it take?
Migrating from RPG III to RPG IV
The automatic conversion works and is the right starting point. The real work begins afterwards, and it pays to know in advance where it gets stuck.
Monitoring performance with WRKSYSSTS
A screen full of numbers of which, usually, only two get read. Which ones actually help, how to read them, and what to do when they say something is wrong.
Managing batch jobs without losing your mind
Why one batch sits in the queue while the others run, and how to bring order to queues, subsystems and priorities without touching anything irreversible.
An introduction to free-form RPG
Free-form is not RPG dressed up as another language: it is the same RPG freed from the columns. What really changes once you stop counting positions.
Optimizing SQL Queries on DB2 for i
When a query slows down, the cause is almost always a missing index or a condition written in a way the database cannot use. Here is how to find out instead of guessing.