It's another Woot OFF!

Get on over to Woot! and wait for that Christmas present you've always been looking for. Once an item is sold out, another one gets put up.

School Days Nostalgia

As one does from time to time, especially as we get a little older, I browse the obituaries from where I grew up and went to school (sounds like a song, doesn't it.) It's a little morbid, I know. I'm not really sure why I do it, other than to see if people I know in my hometown have passed away.

Anyway, as I was browsing the obits today, I saw that a young man (39) had passed away, and the pastor in charge of the mass was an elementary school teacher of mine. Mr. Stein, now Father Stein, was my third grade teacher. I remember him being one of my favorite teachers at the time, and during the school year, he left teaching to become a catholic priest. I was sad that he was leaving us, but knew he was going onto something more important in life.

Being that the obit mentioned the church he was serving at, I looked up the church, and although he didn't have an email address himself, there was a general church email address. So, I sent an email to the church's email address, hoping it sees its way to him. I really hope to hear back from him, as, while I don't remember a whole lot from the 3rd grade, I do remember him being a kind and gentle soul to his students. I don't know if he did this for all his students, but I remember him making a visit to my home to tell me and my parents that he was leaving for the priesthood. That left an impression on me to this day.

I've had a lot of teachers that left an impact on me later in life. While I never recognized it back then, as I've grown older and wiser, I think back to those teachers and remember (most) of them fondly. At times, I will contact them via email, if I have an email address for them, and check up on them, and catch up with them to see what they are up to these days, as most of them have since retired.

My youngest sister is a teacher, and I hope that, when the time comes, one or more of her students will look back to the times when they had my sister as a teacher and remember all the things she taught them, not only school lessons, but life lessons as well.

If you are a teacher, God bless you. If you had a teacher that left an impact on you, let them know, if they are still around. I'm sure they will appreciate it.

Peoplesoft and the iSeries (AS/400)

I don't know how many of my readers (ha ha) use Peoplesoft (EnterpriseOne 8.10) and/or the iSeries (AS/400 - V5R3), but I just found something out that just made my year...

For the past year or so, I've notice that our free disk space on our iSeries has been decreasing at an alarming rate. A little over a year ago, we were close to 90% of capacity on our iSeries. Since we were still over a year away from replacing the current box (we have a 3 year lease), we decided to add disk to the machine. That took us down to about 50% capacity, and also maxing out the total disks we could put in. Over the next year, I noticed that, for some unknown reason, our disk space still kept disappearing. Since we've added disk, we've gone from about 55% to 85% disk utilization. I just thought, since business has been fairly decent, we've just added a lot more records to our Peoplesoft EnterpriseOne (8.10) files. I found out today that I was wrong about that assumption.

Peoplesoft uses a lot of SQL packages. From what I understand, standard installation procedure is to use the library QRECOVERY to store some of the *SQLPGK's. Well, if you don't delete these *SQLPKG's on a regular basis, it begins to consume your available free disk space. Due to some Peoplesoft upgrades we are doing, I needed to delete some Peoplesoft created *SQLPKG's. The consultant I was working with noticed all the *SQLPKG's in the QRECOVERY library, and told me that I could delete those as well. I was told, or so I thought, that you can delete any *SQLPKG files, as long as they didn't start with a Q or were in a library that started with a Q (usually IBM specific libraries.) Well, that's not the case, evidently. Peoplesoft, by default, uses the QRECOVERY library to store some of the *SQLPKG files. These files begin with OW, R, and T as the file name.

Late this afternoon or early evening, I began deleting these *SQLPKG's. I did a wrksyssts to see where we were at, as far as disk space. We were at around 85.6% full. I deleted all the *SQLPKG's that began with OW. That deleted about 12,000 files. It took me down to about 75%. I then deleted all the *SQLPKG's that began with an R. There were only about 15 or so files, so it didn't decrease my disk space noticeably. I then began to delete all the *SQLFILE's that began with a T. I knew there were a ton of files that began with a T. When the delete was done, it had deleted about 62,000 files. It took my disk utilization from 75% down to 38%!!! (I should note here that I did end the Peoplesoft services on the iSeries, prior to deleting the *SQLPKG's)

The unfortunate thing for me is that I've already got my new iSeries system, waiting for IBM to install it. Since I ordered it with almost double the disk capacity that I currently had, it's too late to reduce the amount of disk I really needed. I know that disk is cheap, but it could have saved my company a little more money, had I not ordered as much disk. Disk is cheap, I know...

Talking with the consultant, I found out that this kind of stuff is either not documented, or if it is, it's very well hidden by JDE/Peoplesoft/Oracle. Knowing what I know now, I will be vigilant in deleting these *SQLPKG's on a monthly basis, so I don't panic about free disk space disappearing without explanation.

If just one person, who uses an iSeries and Peoplesoft, learns something new from reading this blog, it's worth it. I'm sure I'm not the only person who didn't know this and wondered where all that disk space went to.