Loathe

utter-ly ridiculous

Yes, yes it is.

Here are my thoughts on the issue:

http://www.webproworld.com/viewtopic.php?p=325864#325864

Well Charlie's got one, so I figured that I needed to keep up with the Jones' or Griefer's as the case may be.

Today were going to talk a little bit about RDBMS issues. See, unlike most of the people I know, I'm not lucky enough to work on Oracle or SQL Server. Nope, I work on DB2 on a mainframe with z/OS operating system. It's slow, it's locked down, and it's a huge PITA.

Here are some of the gotchas that I have come across recently:

1. Connecting to the DB

We were originally using both the IBM DB2 Connect ODBC Driver, and the Shadow Z Connect Neon Driver. Why 2 drivers you ask? Well it seems like the Neon driver was being used to give a bit of application level control over user accounts, you see, across a normal ODBC connection you cannot easily do simple maintenance issues like changing an expired password.

Additionally we had a great many problems just getting the DB Connect drivers and client just to connect to the DB.

2. How do you do user management form within ColdFusion without using the Neon drivers?

Simple answer, that was very difficult to find, you use ADO.

connectionString = "Data Source=#request.native_dsn#;User ID=#client.user_id#;Password=#form.old_passwd#;NEWPWD=#form.new_passwd#";

MyConnection = CreateObject("COM", "ADODB.Connection");

MyConnection.Open(connectionString);

MyConnection.Close();

Watch out for the wrap on that first line of code, it should be all on one line. That took about for ever to figure out, but it works great, so long as you have a good ODBC connection to the DB.

3. Top 10

I come from a SQL Server and Oracle background. In SQL Server you can use the TOP keyword to specify a number of rows returned. I always really liked this functionality. When I had a need for a similar capability my DBA was there for me.

Select bar

from foo

fetch first 10 rows only

works great

So anyway, if you are using CF with DB2 on a mainframe why don't you book mark this shit, and I'll post things here every so often.

Later.