Kelley,
You have gotten a lot of good advice from others but it sounds like you are 
trying to explore alternatives that you might need if you want/need to 
modernize your application.  While I agree with the previous posters I didn't 
see anything that would help you with your understanding of an SQL solution.  
If you could post the statement you are having trouble with I'm sure someone 
could help you with it.
Rick 
-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [
mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx] 
On Behalf Of Kelley Shaddrick
Sent: Thursday, April 26, 2007 5:26 PM
To: midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Sorting
Folks,
I am currently working in a shop that has a lot of older code. The code was run 
through some kind of utility to make it RPG IV compliant, sort of, this was 
done before my time. There are still large numbers of programs that have 
internally defined files, and so on. The other thing that is used very heavily 
is FMTDTA. One of the reasons is that we do a lot of selecting of data. As an 
example, our item number is made up of 5 2-digit codes. Each of these 5 codes 
is used to select the data a user wants to see on screens and reports. 
Depending on what they want, all five could be used or only one or any 
combination of. The data is then sorted into the proper order. The source specs 
for FMTDTA are generated on the fly. FMTDTA seems to do this well.
I've read through a number of entries in the forum archive that discussed open 
query, SQL, etc. These options, from what was written, either don't seem to be 
able to handle this very well, or are not really in favor any more then FMTDTA 
is. I looked briefly at using SQL with the RUNSQLSTM command, but don't seem to 
see any way to use the order by clause (perhaps I'm doing something wrong, but 
I always get an error that it is not a valid tag). I'm concerned with FMTDTA, 
one of these days IBM may just neglect to include it as an option. I'm looking 
for ideas for replacing it with something else.
Thanks,
Kelley 
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