Category: nice to know

Once you are on a mainframe, the most important command is: =3.4. This command is issued on the command line of the so-called ISPF screens. See:   If you are in this screen, simply issue =3.4 and you are in the screen that gives you access to all files. This is the stepping stone into…

When I entered the world of the mainframe, I realised that this is a world on it own; it has their own rules and newbies are not easily accepted here. From a support form I read this message from a sysadm: “.. (this) is a system for people who know what to do and how…

With SAS, I see SAS DI Studio being more and more employed to write data loading jobs. It is understandable to see this development. Within a data warehouse environment we encounter similar procedures, like reading from a file, adding technical keys, combining tables etc, that could be created with the help of pre-built stones. When…

I now work with a mainframe. I realised once more that numeric variables have different formats on a mainframe. As we do not always have a clear description, we should somehow recognise how the data are stored. Let us first show how numeric data can be stored. As an example, I take the number 123.…

About hundred years ago, I worked on a mainframe. I those days, the mainframe was basically the mainstream computer that many people used. In those days, financial institutions started automating their business processes. In the nowadays world, these mainframes are still the workhorses of these financial institutions. But how did we access them? Now, I…

This weekend had bad weather. Rain pouring from the sky and a drop of snow. Such weather is good to undertake something that is absolutely useless like writing a Perl programme on Linux to access a remote Oracle database. The first hurdle to overcome is to install an Oracle client along with some Perl routines…

Sorry to say, but I love Microsoft Visio. Plse do not spread the word. But from time to time, I had to create a document that served two distinct groups: a group who was just interested in getting a highlight and a group who wanted to go into details. In earlier times, I created two…

For some reason, I always overlooked the possibility to include pictures in a database. I decided to overcome this flaw and started experimenting with it. The first step was to create a table in Access. In Access, we have the possibility to use the datatype “OLE Object”. A field with this datatype can be used…

I installed teradata recently. The installation was really straight forward. And as a bonus, you get tons of client tools. It is possible to use several clients to start your sql. A popular tool is BTEQWIN. However, if you google on BTEQWIN, you get lots of questions that ask: how do I connect to the…

Yesterday, I started installing Oracle. I decided to download the newest version: version 11g R. I used windows xp as a platform with DHCP switched off. It really looked simple: the screens look simple and the questions asked were straight forward. I let it go for about 2 hours and after this time I returned…