Re: Sorting

[Booth Martin <booth@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

As you explain the problem, one thought comes to mind:  These designs 
for your applications are very old.  They work well, and they appear to 
be pretty much bullet-proof.  Nothing you can do will make anything run 
better, and you could make things run a lot worse.

To my mind you have the best of all Worlds.  You have no time 
constraints, no serious performance issues., no looming deadlines  What 
a chance to refresh your applications, one at a time, over the next 5 to 
8 years and install the next generation of applications.  Take a few 
months now, study how applications are designed today with layered 
approaches.  Then  take one of your smaller, fringe applications and 
make it your R & D  project for your next generation, the generation 
that will last until 2025 or later.

Take some field trips, study how other shops do the things you do, chat 
a bit with your users (but not too much!), and fool around with various 
solutions.  Make it a real R & D project with new visions and a complete 
from-the-ground-up solution.  Have some real fun with it, blow the doors 
off your IT shop.  :)


Kelley Shaddrick wrote:
> Folks,
>
> I am currently working in a shop that has a lot of older code. The code was 
> run through some kind of utility to make it RPG IV compliant, sort of, this 
> was done before my time. There are still large numbers of programs that have 
> internally defined files, and so on. The other thing that is used very 
> heavily is FMTDTA. One of the reasons is that we do a lot of selecting of 
> data. As an example, our item number is made up of 5 2-digit codes. Each of 
> these 5 codes is used to select the data a user wants to see on screens and 
> reports. Depending on what they want, all five could be used or only one or 
> any combination of. The data is then sorted into the proper order. The 
> source specs for FMTDTA are generated on the fly. FMTDTA seems to do this 
> well.
>
> I've read through a number of entries in the forum archive that discussed 
> open query, SQL, etc. These options, from what was written, either don't 
> seem to be able to handle this very well, or are not really in favor any 
> more then FMTDTA is. I looked briefly at using SQL with the RUNSQLSTM 
> command, but don't seem to see any way to use the order by clause (perhaps 
> I'm doing something wrong, but I always get an error that it is not a valid 
> tag). I'm concerned with FMTDTA, one of these days IBM may just neglect to 
> include it as an option. I'm looking for ideas for replacing it with 
> something else.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Kelley 
>
>
>