Re: Month, day, year fields

Issues, (if any).

1)  Older machines.  Date support came out in no later than V3R1.  There's 
no one getting PAID to write new applications prior to that.  Date field 
support was included in the first release of RPGLE.  RPG/400 allows you to 
read and write date fields, but it treats them as a character field.

2)  If you find an IBM utility that doesn't support date fields, you 
holler out.  Otherwise that's a FUD factor.  And any in house utility that 
hasn't been upgraded since V3R1 and cannot support date fields isn't worth 
spit.  It's utilities like this that keep dinosaur managers saying "you 
can't use RPGLE because my ancient utility that I wrote and am prouder of 
than my first born son relies on RPG/400 positions".

3)  Data extraction works better with date fields than having to either 
doing all that concatenating logic on the client or using a stored 
procedure to do so.  Not that I'm saying a stored procedure is a bad idea 
versus direct data access (don't beat me Joe!).


Rob Berendt
-- 
Group Dekko Services, LLC
Dept 01.073
PO Box 2000
Dock 108
6928N 400E
Kendallville, IN 46755
http://www.dekko.com





Rich Duzenbury <rduz-midrange@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> 
Sent by: midrange-l-bounces+rob=dekko.com@xxxxxxxxxxxx
09/24/2004 03:46 PM
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Re: Month, day, year fields






On Fri, 2004-09-24 at 14:57, rob@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
> Is there any valid reason to design new files with these fields 
separated 
> out, in the physical?  Versus using a true date field?  The only 
> difficulty I see with a true date field is that you either have to learn 

> how to code a null indicator on your field, or use a default date.
> 
> Rob Berendt
In fact, I think that now the database supports date and time fields,
there are few valid reasons for keeping them as separate fields, re: my
SQL nightmare unfolding while trying to do a date selection on a
three-field date.  They are even a pain in query/400.

A few potential issues I can think of to examine:
What about older machine architectures that perhaps don't have date
field support?  If you work on older releases, does the older release
have a date field type?

Some older tools that work with database tables probably can't support
date fields, say, perhaps FMTDTA (I'm not sure).  What about any
in-house tools you might have written that examine numeric or alpha
data?  Can they support a date data type without significant re-work?

What about data extraction?  Do ODBC and JDBC data sources work OK with
AS/400 date fields?

--
Regards,
Rich

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