This workshop will cover:

1. HMC, what it does, when you need one, general care and feeding.
2. FSP updates, why, when, how (two ways: with and without HMC).
3. PTFs for i5/OS, gettin’ ‘em and loadin’ ‘em, and knowing what you have! (including Fix Central overview).
4. VMI - Tape and Optical. The care and feeding of image catalogs and how to clean a virtual tape drive.
5. Management central - performance monitoring, PTF distribution, central site inventory.
6. Storage Management - How much disk is enough (rhetorical question!). Adding disk, managing ASPs (including iASPs)
7. RCLSTG and why you need one.
8. Various System values.
9. Spool file maintenance including use of iASPs, Joblog Servers, and disconnected spool file functions.

You finally have a grasp of SQL (Structured Query Language) basics. In fact, you are comfortable doing the simple things with SELECT, UPDATE, INSERT, and DELETE.  However, when you try to go beyond the basics, attempting more complex SQL statements, it is a challenging and/or a frustrating experience. If this is your experience, this workshop is for you.  The bottom line is that this workshop is designed for those people that have a good understanding of SQL basics and want to take their SQL skills to the next level. Skip Marchesani will combine lecture with live demonstrations (via the internet) to illustrate the SQL concepts and functions discussed in this workshop.

Morning: The workshop will start with a quick review of some SQL basics and then progress to using SQL built in functions for data manipulation and analysis to derive a new column, name a derived column, reformat data, change data types, summarize data, and more.  Next you will explore basic subselect, scalar subselect, and the more advanced forms of subselect; and see how a single SQL statement with subselect can be used in place an RPG or Cobol (or C) program that would require many lines of code.

Afternoon: The afternoon part of this workshop will show how the information from the morning session can be put to work for you. You will:

1. Review the SQL procedure language and how it is used to create SQL stored procedures and SQL triggers.
2. Understand the difference between an external procedure and an SQL procedure, and an external trigger and an SQL trigger.
3. Explore SQL triggers in detail and learn the difference between column, row, and statement level triggers
4. Learn the various parts that make up an SQL trigger and how to code the SQL trigger body.

What is the fastest way to get your System i applications talking to the web? You don’t need Java, ASPs, JSPs or Websphere. You already have everything you need in RPG IV, the System i HTTP Server and CGIDEV2 a free tool from IBM to enable RPG programs to interact easily with a browser.

In this workshop you will see how to:

1. Understand and write basic HTML
2. Understand how a browser communicates with a program through the HTTP server powered by Apache (including basic configuration).
3. Understand the basic principle of the CGI APIs (and why it is better not to use them directly)
4. Use the CGIDEV2 APIs.
5. Code RPG programs to write data to and read data from a web page using CGIDEV2 and externally defined HTML.
6. Write the equivalent of print programs, subfile programs, and maintenance programs.
7. Understand how Javascript and AJAX may have a part to play.

Who Should Attend: Programmers and Analysts who wish to leverage their existing skills to enable them to write programs to interact with the web.

How do I develop applications for the System i? What’s RPG? What’s WDSC? For programmers who are new to the System i, the Developer’s BootCamp is a must! This three-day workshop will introduce the development tools and languages commonly used to create applications for the platform. Attendees will learn to define databases with DDS, automate processes with CL, interact with databases through SQL, and write complex RPG Programs. Attendees will learn basic operating system commands as well as a quick tour through system security. As key technologies for use by a developer, the client based development tools, WebSphere Development Studio Client, will be used as the basis for most discussion and demonstration. There will be a brief overview of the older tools such as PDM, SEU and SDA that are used in some development shops.

To ensure the best student learning environment, this workshop is presented as a combination of lecture, demo and hands-on labs.

The workshop will deliver the following topics:
Day One: Introduction to System i, Basic Operations and Security, Command Language, Using the Eclipse based WDSc Development Tool.

Day Two: WDSc Lab, Intro to DDS, SQL, and RPG SQL

Day Three: RPG Lab, RPG Continued, Screen Design

This session is essential for any developer new to the System i.

This hands-on workshop provides an overview of the available IBM Performance Management tools and shows how to get started to collect and analyze performance data. We will share techniques for performance tuning and provide guidelines for optimizing your system and applications. This workshop will also help you use the IBM tools to plan for future growth and changes to workload and resources. This workshop is directed towards the beginner and intermediate performance analyst and system administrator, but even a performance expert may learn some new tools and techniques.  The lectures and hands-on workshop include the following topics:

1. Collecting performance data with collection services.
2. Analyzing performance data with performance reports and iSeries Navigator performance tools.
3. Use of performance management commands and performance advisor to help tune the system.
4. Drill down to job level performance information to analyze which jobs consume most of the resources.
5. Exercise sizing and capacity planning tools to predict future growth, plan for server consolidation, and prevent performance issues.

This workshop will focus on building a dynamic web based application accessing the System i database. Students will be introduced to Java, JDBC, Servlets, and JSPs. Hands on lab exercises combined with a series of lectures will guide student through all the key components and steps needed to build WebSphere applications working with IBM’s System i database. Students will also learn how to leverage a set of pre-built Java utility classes called WOW which they can freely use to speed their development tasks.

At the end of this workshop students will have:

1. Gained a basic understanding of Java
2. Gained a basic understanding of JDBC
3. Gained a basic understanding of Servlets and JSPs
4. Developed their own dynamic web application using WebSphere Studio, Servlets, JSPs, and a System i database.

COMMON’s first annual Focus workshop conference has just added a special presentation by IBM about the upcoming release of i5/OS V6R1. This preview of the upcoming major release, presented by Gottfried Schimunek, IBM, will help you prepare for program conversion and upgrade. This presentation will take place on Wednesday during lunch-time.

Application Program conversion will be required to run with i5/OS V6R1 and requires program's creation data (observability). IBM will explain what you can do today (using V5R3 and V5R4) to analyze your current application to make sure it will be converted correctly at V6R1. You will also be pointed to beta releases and systems with V6R1 to perform early remote testing of applications.