MIS Departmental improvements

["Dave Odom" <Dave.Odom@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Mike,

You wrote:

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(Giving myself the "I coulda had a V8 head-smack)...

I never thought about that.  Like other products, SEQUEL has the
ability to use views as templates for other views (which set up the
joins automatically) and the ability to define that certain files
should automatically be joined together when both are in the same
view.  But there's such a beautiful simplicity to just doing the join
for the user and letting him use the new "file."  I'm definitely going
to use that idea.

Mike E.
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I think you may be starting to see the benefits of using SQL, and
hopefully in future DB2/400, and what the language and the engine can do
for the IS professional and end user.  Besides the "pre-created" joins
via views, views can provide better security and system resource use,
provided the base tables have good architecture, indexes and security
and the views take advantage of those.  In addition, programmers can be
more productive because they let SQL "match/merge" records into answer
"sets" must easier and faster than writing an RPG record-at-a-time
processing program to go through and "touch" each record in each file. 
And, again, this is only the beginning of the benefits.   From the 70's
until now, IBM and others have been touting the many benefits of SQL and
DB2, especially on the mainframe, but now, hopefully, more midrange
iSeries folks will let SQL and the DB2 engine help them get things done.
   Now this is not to say that SQL and DB2 are the end-all-be-all for
all problems, but I think it appropriate for the iSeries folks to take a
serious look at migrating many of their applications to DB2 and take
full advantage of all it offers.  It will take some re-education and
perhaps some "mind-adjustment" from the typical native world of the
iSeries, but it can be done.

Dave
Arizona