An IBM i Technology Refresh (TR) not only includes fixes to keep your systems stable and secure, but they almost always include enhancements to make it easier to take your systems and databases to the next level. The latest TRs for the IBM i 7.5 and 7.6 releases include such enhancements.
There are two Db2 enhancements that I would like to highlight from the latest IBM i TRs. First, more granular controls for the SQL Error Logging Facility aka SELF with the ability to specify an exclusion list. Back in 2023, SELF was enhanced with the special values of *ERROR, *WARNING, and *ALL to make it easy to have Db2 log all SQL errors or warnings instead of having to register a bunch of individual SQL code values. While those special values make it easy to log all SQL statements that result in an error or warning, that also means that you have more SELF log data to review and analyze.
The exclusion list is a compromise between registering individual SQL codes to log and logging all SQL error or warning codes. In the following example, the user is using SELF to find all the SQL statements failing with an error. However, they want to ignore any requests failing with SQL code -204 which is returned when an SQL statement references an object that doesn’t exist. This SQL error code could be a normal event because they frequently run SQL scripts which always try to delete a work table with the DROP statement before creating the work table.
CREATE OR REPLACE VARIABLE SYSIBMADM.SELFCODES VARCHAR(256)
DEFAULT (SYSIBMADM.VALIDATE_SELF('*ERROR EXCLUDING -204'))
Second, the HTTP functions in QSYS2 have been enhanced with logging and decompression options to make it easier for IBM i developers to use SQL to integrate with web services. Even though the QSYS2 HTTP functions have been available for over 5 years, when performing SQL performance assessments our IBM Expert Labs team continues to shockingly find clients using the old, CPU hogging HTTP functions in the SYSTOOLS library.
This round of TRs is heavier on the
security and systems management side of IBM i, so you will also want to take
time to review all the enhancements
available with the newest technology refreshes for the IBM i 7.5 and 7.6
releases. It’s also important to
remember that each IBM i Technology Refresh results in updates to the Memo To
Users (MTU) for the associated release. These
documents should be reviewed prior to applying the TRs to your system just like
you would before installing a new IBM i release level:
