March 3, 2021

MC RPG Developer

Lead Article - Programming

SQL 101: A Data Definition Language Hands-on Tour, Part 7

Today’s TechTip is a two-for-one. I’ll talk about SQL’s OVRDBF replacement, ALIAS, and a simple yet dangerous SQL statement, DROP. Keep reading to find out more.

By Rafael Victória-Pereira

Let’s start with ALIAS. In a nutshell, we can say that ALIAS is Override Database File (OVRDBF) made simple, practical, and permanent.

If you ever used the OVRDBF CL command, then the functionality provided by ALIAS should be easy to grasp; it’s exactly the same! If you never used OVRDBF, it’s a way to use an alternate name for a file or, most importantly, a member of a file. This is especially important because you can’t specify a file member in SQL. The file member concept is an IBM i peculiarity, and SQL has no idea how to handle it. Fortunately, the CREATE ALIAS SQL instruction allows you to create a name for a given member of a file.

Feature Article - Programming

ILE RPG Tutorial: Using CALLP to Call an ILE Program

Learn how to use a prototyped call, an alternative to an ILE RPG sub-procedure, to call one program from another

by David Shirey

Editor’s Note: This article is excerpted from chapter 8 of 21st Century RPG: /Free, ILE, and MVC, by David Shirey.

In some situations, when using an ILE sub-procedure in your program, you may want to write the sub-procedure up as a small program and then call it from another program. Granted, that is not technically a sub-procedure, but we will let that go for the moment and concentrate on the call of one program by another.

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Node Webinar Series Pt. 1: The World of Node.js on IBM i

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Featured News - Training

System i Developer Announces 2021 Hands-On Workshops for IBM i Developers

8 full-day workshops feature labs & live instruction, online

System i Developer today announces Summit Hands-On Live!, a series of live, interactive workshops that will take place online each Tuesday and Thursday from April 27, 2021 through May 20, 2021.

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