First up let’s look at a print screen of the work with active jobs displays showing the jobs RUN PRIORITY

Look at the column labeled “PTY” … To see this column you have to press F11 from the WRKACTJOB display

So the jobs RUN PRIORITY (emphasis added) allows the higher priority jobs (in this case it’s sort of counter intuitive because the priorities go from lowest to highest, so 99 would be very low and 1 would be high priority) to get the best service from the CPU.

So sometimes it helps to crank up the job priority for a job that needs extra processing resources, technically it only needs to be one level higher than the other jobs in the same subsystem. Typically batch jobs run at priority 50 and interactive runs at priority 20 because you don’t want green screen folks waiting a long time while reports can crank away in the background without using up a bunch of system resources.

Now let’s look at a job priority. This is a totally different thing from the run priority we just discussed. The job priority is how a job is sequenced to run while it’s waiting in a job queue. Here is a print screen from the WRKJOBQ command.

These priorities rank from 1 to 9 with 1 being the highest priority.

As you can see from the print screen “JOB1″ has a job priority of 6 which puts it at the bottom of the job queue. So JOB1 will wait until jobs JOB2 and JOB3 have run before it get’s submitted to the subsystem for processing. Also if another job with a higher job priority is placed in the job queue it will still wait it’s turn to run.

Often times people will want to be able to change the run priority of a job, this is accomplished by changing the subsystem configuration including the job description used. But that’s an article for another day.

Another area you will see priorities like this are in the output queues with spool files and they function similarly.

John Andersen is an IT manager and ten year veteran of the AS/400 platform. If you liked this article then you will be interested in his Power System Jump Start course. You can claim your copy today by logging on to http://www.midrangejumpstart.com

If you inherited a box that has been pre-configured then the setups for the system values is usually done for you requiring very little intervention on your part. But for a brand new system out of the box you will have to setup the operating system and the values.

The AS/400 system values are basically flags that configure and control various aspects of your IBM system. From security, job control and configuration there is a system value for just about every aspect of administration.

One prime example is the QCTLSBSD value. This essentially tells the operating system how to handle the jobs. Either run everything under one primary subsystem called QBASE or to divvy jobs up into there own subsystems like QBATCH and QINTER for interactive (“green-screen”) jobs.

By default, out of the box your AS/400, iSeries and IBM i will be setup for QBASE. In most all cases, if this is a production box this is something you WILL want to change for improved performance and to prevent jobs from directly competing for the same resources.

To review your system values use the command Display System Value DSPSYSVAL and press F4 to prompt for the values. There are a lot of them and you will want to make use of the F1 key to gather more information about them.

Another important system value is the AUTOCFG value. What this does is tell the operating system that when a device is connected to automatically create and configure the device description.

This can help you out immensely, especially when setting up terminal sessions to connect to the system. It will create the devices for you saving you tons of time and frustration.

Of course there is a drawback as well: when you move a device around like a tape drive it will be treated like another device and be renamed. For instance if the tape device was originally setup as TAP01 it will then be TAP02. When this happens you them have to manually intervene and change the device descriptions to get things straightened out.

And if you have to comply with Sarbox regulations then start becoming familiar with the security features of the i operating system including the system values for object auditing and journaling. These offer allot of granularity when it comes to security auditing.

Query/400 is completely menu driven, making it very easy to use and friendly from a user standpoint so you don’t have to learn any complicated syntax or SQL… although it can certainly help if you do know SQL.

To fire up Query/400 simply type in “WRKQRY” on a command line and you should be greated with a simple looking screen asking you to build a new query or modify an existing one.

Once you enter in the name of your query definitition you will be brough to a menu of options. Now for probably 90% of the queries you will write you will probably only ever use the options for:

Specify file selections
Select and sequence fields
Select records

This gives you a straight up query of one or more files with as many constraints as you can possibly think of. Sometimes you will add an option to sort by one or more fields.

One handy feature of Query is using the F5 key to run and preview the report. But keep in mind that when you run this option is can consume a lot of system resources especially if temporary indexes have to be built. The simple rule of thumb is the longer it takes for something to show up when pressing F5 the less often you should use it when building your queries.

I like Query/400 *alot* and although I don’t write many permanent queries that are saved and used I find it an indespensible tool for quick and dirty reports to validate data or for looking up information. Even though Query/400 has been around for ages and ages it is still a great tool and because of its versatility I highly recommend you use it for all of your report building and data inquiry needs.

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This is where report mining comes in.

You may not have heard the term “report mining” before but essentially report mining is just taking your printable reports from your AS40 or iSeries and bringing them over to your PC into a program like Excel, then scrubbing them up a bit.

Maybee you need to calculate some additional fields or condense the data into an easy to read format. This is where report mining can really come through.

Getting data off of your AS400 to a PC used to be a major hassle back in the dark ages… in fatc people hated it so much that software vendors sprung up all over to accomplish this now routine task.

If you have the luxury of having a programmer on staff that can write reports all day long then your in luck. But some places can’t and hiring an outside consultant to write reports at $175 dollars an hour adds up quickly.

Another option is using the excellent tool you might have is Query/400. This allows you to write simple reports joining together data from one or more files. 

Unfortunatley Query has limited logic capabilities that are handled better by regular programmed reports, but for probably 80% of the reporting needed it will suffice.

Anyhow, back to report mining. If the data you want to get at is already a part of an existing report then you are in luck. No need to write a query since you can just mine that report to get what you want.

The process is really simple and takes only a few mouse clicks.

Using Operations Navigator you can simply browse the printer data on the system then drag and drop any report on your As400 or iSeries onto your desktop. The software then automatically converts it into a text file.

Now this works with reports that are still in an outq on the system. The best way to handle this is to have your spool files go to your own output queue that is not attached to a writer.

After copying the file over to your PC, simply open up that text file with the Excel data import wizard, add the column breaks, clean up the report headings and you are off to the races.

This really is a poor mans way to generate reports, but its really simple and you should already have all the tools to do it installed on your computer.

All you need is Operations Navigator (aka iSeries Navigator) and Excel.

If you need something more complex then look into the other options out there like writing reports using Query or the Excel Add-in.