Re: OPNQRYF Education

At 05:36 PM 1/21/98 -0800, you wrote:
>Does anybody know of a decent book that goes into a lot of detail
>about opnqryf ??? I have used it for years to do simple sorts, and
>"VERY" simple record selections but I would now like to expand my
>knowledge of this very powerful command, but figuring out how many
>""""""""""" is a little too much when you get in a hurry and want to
>do somthing as simple as select records from a file that are stored
>with date values mmddyy and you wish to do a range selection..... 
>just too many *cat,*bcat,',"""",,etc,etc.... throw in some passed
>variables and you end up somthing that looks like Fortran done in a
>drunken rage.........

The definitively best pitch you can get on OPNQRYF is Jim Sloan's pitch
from COMMON.  I keep a handout by the side of my desk for reference.  In
recent years, IBM has been putting more and more of his examples in the
books, but IBM books are sometimes difficult to get access to.

OPNQRYF is like riding a bicycle, the more you do it, the better you get at
it.  It's tough to start out with.

My opinion, is that OPNQRYF is not strategic for IBM, because they think
everyone in the world will want to use SQL (which might be the case
someday), so it's plausible that it will not keep up with database
encancements.  On the otherhand, IBM knew for sure that the entire world
would move up to OS/2...

Al

Al Barsa, Jr. - Account for Midrange-L
Barsa Consulting, LLC.  
400 > 390

Phone:  914-251-9400
Fax:    914-251-9406





Private mail should be sent to barsa@ibm.net
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