Re: Sorting

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