Saturday, September 23, 2017

How to get a year-month value in DB2

I quickly needed to check the monthly progress of a certain variable over time. Problem was that those bookings/incomes are spread over the month, sometimes only one booking line, sometimes two... So I needed a grouping variable, that the "absolute month", i.e. the usual year-month value,that you know from financial system, e.g. 201709 for this current month.

Here's the easy way to put that into a function on DB2:

create function yearmonth(TS date) returns varchar(6) no external action deterministic return rtrim(char(year(TS))) || right(digits(month(TS)),2)

Then you can easily do a group by yearmonth(date).
(Don't omit the "not external action" and "deterministic" parts, because a) they are true and b) they are needed for grouping)

Of course you don't have to create a function for this, but easier then re-typing it, or creating a view.

(You might want to create the same function for timestamp as well... just so happened that I now only needed it with the date signature).

You're welcome :)

Sunday, July 02, 2017

Instagram is weird...

So I posted two (only 2 !!) pictures of a garden on instagram, and all of a sudden I get dozens of followers with garden-related accounts/names. I did not even tag those images as garden-something....


Weird


.

Sunday, April 23, 2017

OnePlus One with Lineage OS

So, haven't posted here in a while... sorry 'bout that... Here's what happened most recently:

My Nexus 5X decided to get stuck in a bootloop (like most others in the world). Started with random reboots a couple of weeks ago, and then, one day after I upgraded to Android 7.1.2, on the way to a friend, it decided to no longer even go into the recovery mode. Totally offline.

Luckily, this very friend of mine, had a spare OnePlus One with CM on it, which I'm now the proud owner of. Since we went for a quick vacation in Lisbon just days after the bootloop incident, I decided just to move the most important data and apps on the OnePlus One (OPO from here-on) and properly set it up after the vacation.

That's what I did yesterday. Flash it with Lineage OS 14.1 and gApps. Right after the reboot it offered to re-installed apps (and quite a lot of settings) from the last backup of the Nexus 5X.
Since I had no recent backup (adb backup) of my Nexus 5X (I should have seen the crash coming, shouldn't I...) and I could not even get into recovery mode (to pull a new adb backup) that was the only thing I could rely on.  LastPass again helped me to sign into those apps really fast, and a couple of hours later I was up and running with OPO+LIN14.1

The two most cumbersome steps on the 2 hop migration (there was the minimum install on CM two weeks ago) was my Banking app, since both times I had to call my bank to reset the default device for the mobile TAN security feature (should have known this yesterday, but then again, just a 2min call to the bank, even off-hours... real good customer service, I have to admit),  and the RSA token app I have to use for authentication for my company (vmware); that needed re-initialisation with the help from the help desk as well.

So frist thing: have a backup of the new device ... CHECK.

And again: Thanks, Max, for the fast help with the OPO...