July 2026 meeting

On Tuesday July 14 at 6:30 PM (CT), we welcome Gregory Simmons as the presenter for our March meeting. See the time in your time zone.

This meeting is online, FREE, and open to everyone. To register click on this link here

Presentation: Finding Data in the Forest: Exploring Three-Part Naming in SQL
As IBM i environments grow, accessing data across multiple systems becomes increasingly labor intensive. In this session, we will explore how SQL three-part naming can simplify distributed data access by allowing developers to directly reference remote objects using RelationalDatabase.Schema.Object syntax.

Attendees will learn how to configure remote database access, execute distributed SQL queries, and stage remote data locally for reporting and analysis. The session also explores the challenges that arise as distributed environments scale and introduces a reusable SQL procedure approach for dynamically querying multiple systems across the network. Data structures in RPG have evolved far beyond their original capabilities, offering modern features that can make your applications more powerful and maintainable. In this session, Simon will go past the fundamentals to explore advanced techniques, including nested data structures, initialization shortcuts, data structure arrays, and integration with SQL. You'll see practical examples that demonstrate how these features can simplify coding, improve performance, and make your RPG programs cleaner and easier to maintain.

Bio: Gregory Simmons is a Project Manager with PC Richard & Son. He started on the IBM i platform in 1994, graduated with a degree in Computer Information Systems in 1997 and has been working on the OS/400 and IBM i platform ever since. He has been a registered instructor with the IBM Academic Initiative since 2007, an IBM Champion and holds a COMMON Application Developer certification. When he's not trying to figure out how to speed up legacy programs, he enjoys speaking at technical conferences, running, backpacking, hunting, and fishing.