SQL and most data-bases other than DB2 have no concept of multi-member files. Since we designed m-Power to work with any data-base, we removed the member definitions that exist in the mrc-Productivity Series data dictionaries from the m-Power data dictionaries.
At first glance, you might look at this and think that means m-Power cannot handle multi-member files. But you would be wrong. Using multi-member files with m-Power on a System i is different. I’m going to show you how easy it really is with m-Power.
Suppose I have a multi-member physical file called ‘myfile‘ in a library called ‘mylib‘ with two members called ‘mbr1‘ and ‘mbr2‘. Also suppose that I want to build an m-Power servlet over ‘mbr2‘.
All I have to do to accomplish this is go into SQL on the System i and create an alias for the file/member combination I want to use. In this case, the SQL command would be:
CREATE ALIAS mylib/newfilenm FOR mylib/myfile(mbr2)
What I have done here is created an alias called ‘newfilenm’ in library ‘mylib‘. I sign on to m-Power and import ‘mylib/newfilenm‘ into my data dictionary just like I would any other physical file.
That’s it, I am ready to use it to build servlets.
The only functionality that you have with multi-member files in mrc-Productivity Series that you cannot get with m-Power is the ability to build something over the consolidation of all members. Perhaps, the multi-member file users out there should lobby IBM to allow a member name ‘*ALL‘ on the CREATE ALIAS command.