User-defined functions are flexible and easy to create. Add them to your development toolkit to create powerful new solutions for your company.

By Bruce Vining

Many of you are quite familiar with DDS and the ability to define physical and logical database files. For instance, if we have a physical file MYFILE defined as shown below, we can create logical files that provide a subset of the physical file fields, map physical fields to logical fields through operators such as CONCAT and SST, map physical data types to other types, etc.:

by Sam Lennon

Often, I need to convert from legacy dates to true dates. I convert mostly so I can easily do date arithmetic, but sometimes just for readability in ad hoc queries over old files. I'm a big fan of true dates and preach their usage when I get the chance, but there is some CPU overhead. This article is about improving efficiency in converting to true dates and reducing some of that overhead.