Yesterday, Carsten Pedersen and Roland Bouman of MySQL AB visited us to tell us a bit about the MySQL certification program. Although I've been using MySQL for several years they told me of some features I simply never used before. Of course I had heard of 'stored procedures' before, but I just did not use them at all. One of the reasons is that all of our products are database independent and stored procedures are not. In other words: writing a MySQL stored procedure for ATK would mean all people using ATK on an Oracle or Postgres database would suddenly get fatal errors.

In the training they explained what stored procedures and functions are and I got curious. "Okay, so I can use a programming language sort of thing in MySQL. So how powerfull is this?". Driving back I suddenly realised I would do a really stupid and most probably useless experiment: to try to build a website entirely in MySQL, leaving the PHP part out? With that in mind I couldn't really do anything else than boot my computer once I got home, and keep hacking it until my application was finished.

When building applications on an IBM i-series platform you probably want to use the DB2 database. Zend Core for IBM i-series supports this database since the db2_ functions were introduced. These functions allow you to use the DB2 database like you would any other database, but lacks the support for manipulating librarylists. It turns out this is possible by using the i5_ functions. Below an example of how to do so.