Re: How to grant limited access to BPCS user? Query/400

Khalid 

A lot of good points have been made about the pros & cons of putting 
Query/400 in the hands of general users. Different philosophies at different 
companies lead to different risks & concerns ... I have been denied access to 
As/Set, and I now let queries that drive the 400 to its knees be identified 
as the mass users as priorities to re-write in RPG/400 ... down the road I 
want to try to have Corporate love for Query/400 incorporated into the sizing 
questionairre & when we increase our # of users license, that should 
automatically trip an update to the sizing questionairre reccommendations, 
which it does not now do.

We now have about 2 days every month that no one gets any work done on the 
400, out of our close to 50 users, because everything has been locked up by 
inefficient queries that need to access several large files batch mode in 
inquiry sub-system ... 6 months or so ago this was perhaps 1/2 day per month. 
 18 months ago I saw this coming but no one else was concerned.  You see the 
trend?

Have you budgeted to get the faster processor & massive additional memory for 
the 400 that is needed for large scale Query/400 usage ... we do run a lot of 
Query via JOBQ, but it is sufficiently user-hostile to accomplish this, that 
only our most experienced Query users actually do so, when working at WRKQRY 
& I have not yet figured out how to do it at RUNQRY or CL from BPCS menu ... 
ideally I want the users to run query from CL ... key in their selection 
criteria for this run ... then have the whole thing go to JOBQ.

Another thing I want to learn is if I can have an on-line Query/400 CL from a 
user in QINTER switch to QBATCH for the duration of the Query, or even get 
RUNQRY & WRKQRY in a different sub-system.
 
Initially you were concerned about the security issues for people in some 
departments SEEING data that they ought not to.

The next threat I see looming are where consultants are increasingly swearing 
by SQL but not having a sense of which people it is inappropriate to be 
teaching SQL to ... so ordinary users ask consultants how to solve business 
problems & they are told  STRSQL then key in this complicated string of stuff 
the user has no idea what it means & what the significance is of EL TYPO & 
then is experimenting with this neat stuff when I stumble over that fact.  In 
this scenario, users could CHANGE data they have no business messing with & 
not be the wiser, and no one able to figure out how the data got corrupted 
because it was done outside of BPCS audit trails.

SSA Help Line won't tell ME (Company Programmer) command strings to delete 
garbage records, but our consultants do tell my end users command strings to 
get into SQL - perhaps I am asking the wrong people for my help.

I am extremely happy that my new boss understands that there are risks to the 
usage of DFU SQL QUERY and any other tool to access or change BPCS data 
outside of the system ... they ALL have risks ... different kinds & scales.

Have your users been delivered of high quality BPCS education & easy access 
to BPCS documentation which they do in fact USE?  If not, then they will 
generate bogus & inefficient queries that essentially corrupt 400 performance 
for all users, corrupt queries that were in fact A-Ok, & make major corporate 
decisions based on this incorrect information.  Have you reviewed the quality 
of the BPCS documentation in the hands of the users who will be creating 
queries, so that they understand how to exclude BPCS soft-deleted records, 
use efficient access paths, and the flow of data from file to file?  
Query/400 creators need much higher quality BPCS documentation than is needed 
by people merely running stuff off BPCS menus.

Al Macintyre  ©¿©
http://www.cen-elec.com MIS Manager Programmer & Computer Janitor
BPCS 405 CD Rel2+ OS/400 V4R3 mixed mode
Our lemon/400 has been upgraded to 170 with about 400 Meg of memory & hungry 
for more
When in doubt, read the manual, assuming you can find the right one.
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