Stuck trying to move a lot of data up to your IBM i? Don't spend a lot of time trying to invent complicated solutions with lots of programming; check out how to use free tools to create a high-performance upload solution. Stuck when your file is full and won't let you add more data? Check out our "basics" article about two important IBM i file properties that you need to know about.

Having only ever watched about 5 minutes of Star Trek, the phrase "beam me up" is the only data point about the show that I'm aware of. In this article, the "beaming" applies to data that is not currently on your IBM i but that you desperately want to get into the system. About the time Star Trek was originally aired, beaming data into your system was done with punched cards, or the new-fangled 8" floppy disks (I recently had to explain to somebody that the term "floppy disk" originated with 8" disks, which were, indeed, floppy). If you were lucky, you worked in a shop where beaming data into the system might have involved the majestic 5251 twinax terminal.

Chana, a C# developer, sent me the following message:

"We are using iSeries ODBC driver to connect to AS400 files and write/delete some data to it. The issue is that when I use DELETE FROM MYFILE command, rows deleted, but size of the file stays the same as previous to delete. That's why this file continues to grow constantly and finally (as we suspect) causing problems inserting data to it. Can you help me with this?"