Re: Restructuring program to cope with modern database layouts

Hello Charles,

Am 15.05.2025 um 17:40 schrieb Charles Wilt <charles.wilt@xxxxxxxxx>:

VARCHAR fields in Db2 (and all RDBMs as far as I know) are not null terminated.

Ah! The I confused this somehow with handling of strings with record I/O in C on IBM i. This needs conversion from <=> to C-strings.

You're never going to need %STR()..

Thanks for clarification!

While the conversion from VARCHAR to FIXED will work fine, neither Db2 nor RPG will automatically trim the trailing spaces on a write back to the DB.

Thanks for the hint! At the moment, I'm just reading from the DB.

Ideally, you should use VARCHAR in RPG.

Need to review this topic in the documentation. Have no memory about it.

One more note of warning, on the table definitions, be sure to specify ALLOCATE(X) where X is a large enough value to handle approx 80% of the values expected. Otherwise, every I/O will actually take 2. One for the fixed row area, and one for the overflow area where varying data is stored.

Thanks for the hint!

:wq! PoC