A few weeks ago, I wrote about how you can Manage PTFs with Navigator; that blog reviewed the PTF management capabilities that you can now use to manage your PTFs via the Web browser. I also mentioned that you can acquire your PTFs from Fix Central. However, there’s one additional thing to consider – how do you easily know if there are PTF updates applicable to your system that you should download?
IBM has introduced an IBM i Service – Group PTF Currency that does just this. I haven’t written much (yet!) about the IBM i Services or the Db2 for i Services, but over the past couple years, IBM has been adding more and more function to these services. These services allow you to use SQL for systems management features. That is, you can use SQL to access system information programmatically without coding to an API.
The PTF Currency service allows you to run a query whose results will tell you what PTF groups are available from Fix Central versus what you have installed on your system. When you run this query, the service will connect to Fix Central from your IBM i to do a live comparison of what PTF groups are available versus installed.
I am an SQL novice, so I used Run SQL Scripts in Access Client Solutions to run the example query provided in documentation.
SELECT * FROM SYSTOOLS.GROUP_PTF_CURRENCY ORDER BY PTF_GROUP_LEVEL_AVAILABLE - PTF_GROUP_LEVEL_INSTALLED DESC;
Below is a screen capture of the query results in a nice table. This was very simple to use and I discovered I had missed a couple groups when I last updated the PTF groups on my test partition.
This blog post was edited to fix broken links on April 12, 2020.
This blog post was originally published on IBMSystemsMag.com and is reproduced here by permission of IBM Systems Media.