RE: Report breaks in Query and Query manager

Thanks for a great overview of QM!

-----Original Message-----
From: Vernon Hamberg [mailto:vhamberg@xxxxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Friday, August 12, 2005 9:44 PM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: RE: Report breaks in Query and Query manager 


Whether to use Query Management queries (the data) & forms (the layout) is 
a good question. But you can easily try things out. E.g., the commands to 
create and execute QM queries are already in the OS - no extra cost. Query 
Manager, which is a Query/400-like interface to Query Management queries 
and forms, is part of the licensed product 57xx-SQ1, which also has 
interactive SQL and the precompilers.

The command to run a QM query is STRQMQRY - you can actually tell it to use 
Query/400 *QRYDFN objects. So you could see what it is like to run the
things.

It is also possible to retrieve both queries and forms from existing 
*QRYDFN objects. There are some limitations - all join types in Query/400 
are converted into type-1 joins. But you DO get a warning to that effect.

Query Management is based on SQL. A QMQRY is an object compiled from a 
source member that contains almost any SQL statement, including SELECT - 
RUNSQLSTM cannot do SELECT statements.

If Query/400 is an end-user tool for you, you could go to Query Manager 
fairly easily. Although it is actually SQL. it is possible to use it in a 
PROMPTed mode that is almost exactly the same as Query/400. There are a 
couple differences - e.g., layout is done by taking F13 to work on a form - 
and vice versa. This is instead of a single list of options as in 
Query/400. But not especially hard.

You can tell Query manager to use the word "file" instead of "table", so it 
feels more like good old Query/400.

And eventually your users might like learning SQL - it has more power than 
Query/400 - esp. record selection, which is tedious in Query/400.

There ARE some things Query/400 does more easily than Query Management - 
summary-only reports come to mind. So take a look at the Query Management 
Programming Guide (something like that), which you can find at InfoCenter 
under Database->Manuals (or some such). There is also a Query manager 
User's Guide that, IIRC, contains a nice tutorial.

Substitution values can be passed easily to QMQRYs - you can get different 
results based on user input in a program. But this is less important if 
this is an end-user tool - albeit still useful. But you can very quickly 
write a command and command processing program that pass values from the 
command prompt directly into a query.

I think you can tell I like these things - take a serious look at them.

Centerfield Technology at http://www.centerfieldtechnology.com has a tool, 
QUERY/convert, IIRC, that can convert multiple Query/400 definitions into 
QM objects. It will put the warning messages into the retrieved source, 
which the system RTVQM*** commands do not - the messages are in the job log.

HTH
Vern

At 03:42 PM 8/12/2005, you wrote:

>It's Query/400.  We don't use Query manager but it's on our system.  Is
>there a compelling reason to do so?  We have about 25 query users and
>several thousand queries.