December Article by Ted Holt: The Death of OPNQRYF

[Guest.Visitor]

December Article by Ted Holt: The Death of OPNQRYF

It could go the other way too. I might decide that paper and pencil is more cost effective. Maybe hiring a team of monks with vegetable ink and papyrus. No, maybe, stone tablets, hammers, and chisels. There's probably a dedicated group of users making marks on the ground with a stick.

[B.Myrick]

December Article by Ted Holt: The Death of OPNQRYF

Mike, "Dedicated" group of users? -bret "Quill and Ink" Myrick

[cwscholbe@dstsystems.com]

December Article by Ted Holt: The Death of OPNQRYF

I just read about a group that is copying the St. John's Bible? making their own paper and Caligraphy. It takes between 8 and 10 hours per page. But the examples I saw were beautiful. Pen and paper are NOT out of style. This was in National Geographic or Smithsonian magazine.

[B.Myrick]

December Article by Ted Holt: The Death of OPNQRYF

Once I burn out completely, I need to find a project like that. Maybe do a freehand pen of the Bard himself, William Shakespear. That or take Goose's suggestion to Maverick and take up truck driving. -bret

[frankgw@adelphia.net]

December Article by Ted Holt: The Death of OPNQRYF

Oh Dear! I feel compelled to report that we are back to using old, but reliable DDS. That's right, we have temporarily abandoned our efforts at using Ops Nav for creating our new external file descriptions. Here's the reason. We ran into a problem and called the IBM SupportLine. They informed us to install PTF SF99104 which was described as a database fix pack. Guess what! It's too large to download via Electronic Customer Support and will be mailed to us on a CD. Maybe we're getting a little too close to IBM's bleeding edge. Oh well, we will get back to Ops Nav next year. Meanwhile - Happy Holidays! At least we don't have to worry about the Y2K Bug this time around.

[David Abramowitz]

December Article by Ted Holt: The Death of OPNQRYF

This is nothing new. Every "Torah" in every synogogue throughout the world is hand written. The people who do this dedicate their entire life to this task. I'm sure it would be more expedient to do this some other way, but I'll let someone else tell them that. Dave

[frankgw@adelphia.net]

December Article by Ted Holt: The Death of OPNQRYF

per Ted "Midrange Computing has an SQL book coming out soon. I didn't write it. The guy who wrote it has been using SQL against the AS/400 and other servers for years. He likes the AS/400 over anything else by far." ------------------------------------------------------- Ted - Is the newly announced book "SQL at Work" by Howard F. Arner, Jr. the book you that you were referencing?

[T.Holt]

December Article by Ted Holt: The Death of OPNQRYF

Frank asked: Is the newly announced book "SQL at Work" by Howard F. Arner, Jr. the book you that you were referencing? Frank, First, the apology. I have had "one of those weeks", both work-wise and personal-life-wise, & something had to give, so I didn't look at the fora all week. So, I'm sorry for not answering the question sooner. You are correct. It was Howard's book to which I am referring. Just a little background for those who don't know anything about Howard, this guy has been programming for years in languages most of us old midrangers have never used, like C, Prolog, and VB. He's never programmed in RPG. He came to the AS/400 after using other servers (thru SQL interfaces, like ODBC), and became sold on the magazine. He thinks it's the best server out there, and is wild about the machine. I know those of us who have been writing RPG for years are wild about the iSeries (AS/400), but it's nice to run into somebody who didn't come up that way and is wild about it.

[msny@buckeye-express.com]

December Article by Ted Holt: The Death of OPNQRYF

I would like to add my 2 cents here and say I "cut teeth" on OPNQRYF. I recently had to unbind my old copy of Ted's Magic book cause it was falling apart from use !!! I now have it 3 holed punched in a binder on my desk SAFE. As an applications programmer now for 7 years for a tier 1 automotive company I use OPNQRYF as an integrated part of my CL & RPG applications. I have at minimum 50 such applications using it. Why ? Well, I have users that DEMAND multiple sorting and this delivers. They want to be able to select on the fly sorting routines from a display and I have many such programs that do just that. it is flexible and really easy to use once you understand it. It also has a lot of power to deliver results that even built logicals can't deliver. Trust me, I've done it many times. Ted has mentioned that IBM want us to use IBM/SQLRPG instead. I have a few programs that use this method but I find the logic coding "messy" within an RPG program. Well anyways, my hat is off to Ted for such a great book. I've used it for years and don't intend to stop as long as OPNQRYF still works.

[Guest.Visitor]

December Article by Ted Holt: The Death of OPNQRYF

Good morning and please excuse a rookies question, don't any of theses application developement tools (Lansa, to name one) address the issues of leveraging ones existing skills to meet this afternoons demands? At first glance it looks to Me as if an integrated tool to write code using existing business rules and giving Me a familiar view of the data would be enough to say 'LETS GO !!!' What am I missing in this conversation?