Re: [Bulk] Re: Getting DDS for a DDL Generated File (or convince me its unnecessary)

On 1/21/2016 1:49 PM, Justin Dearing wrote:

On Thu, Jan 21, 2016 at 1:34 PM Buck Calabro <kc2hiz@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Personally, I would be fighting and kicking to avoid working with
multi-member files but I feel morally obliged to share how I work with
them.

There is no need for them in modern applications, except for the
partitioning, which of course makes them seemless. However, they exist on
systems, and there is RPG and COBOL calling them. I'd rather be able to
explore them from SQL if that's possible. Naturally I'll likely make
aliases when I need to talk to the third member of file X. However, I just
want to see how close I can get to SELECT * FROM SCHEMA.TABLE(MEMBER).

My last post on this, promise :-)

'Explore from SQL' could mean a lot of things. Mostly, it means that
off the shelf tools are not going to work unless you write a simple sort
of tool to do a bunch of CREATE ALIAS statements.

Many moons ago, I read an article in one of the trade magazines;
probably written by Bob Cozzi, on how to run an SQL statement from the
command line by way of QMQRY. I have a utility that I have been using
on my green screen terminal command line for decades. It's written up
in the wiki: http://wiki.midrange.com/index.php/SQL#SQL_via_QM_Query
The current incarnation handles overrides to a specific member. This
works great for me in my green screen world but it's useless if you want
to query a multi-member file from Java, PHP, ODBC, etc.

If I were to really want to access any given member ad hoc via JDBC, I'd
think about writing a stored procedure or maybe a UDTF that would take
the SQL statement, file and member as parameters, perform the OVRDBF,
PREPARE and EXECUTE the SQL statement and return the results as a result
set / table back to the caller. It's indirect, but I just don't see how
to directly access any given member ad hoc through an interface that
does not support members. Thus, the original idea of a utility to
create (and thinking of cleaning up after myself, drop) ALIASes in advance.