R1464 is a technical release intended to support DB2 Version 7.
We apply upgrades to major system components such as DB2
in development and acceptance environments before implementing
in production.  Last Thursday a problem was discovered in the
development and acceptance net.data web EDB inquiry environments
but not in production.  Development and acceptance were at the
version 7 level of DB2 whereas production was at the version 6 level,
so clearly it was a side effect of version 7.

Generally the symptom was missing data, for instance, hire date
not being displayed.  Three functions, format_number, format_SSN,
and format_date were not operating correctly.  'When the function call
directly referenced an SQL selected column, the data was not properly
passed to the function.  The returned "formatted" data field was blank.
All such calls have been modified to move the SQL selected data to
a work field, which in turn is used as the function parameter.'

Timing was very tight, as we were scheduled to upgrade to version 7
in production on Sunday.  Base testing of changes to the net.data
code went well on Friday in development environments, and on
Saturday I tried the modified code in one production environment
to confirm that it is backwardly compatible.  Then on Sunday,
after the production DB2 upgrade, assuming that you would need
a fully functioning production web environment first thing on Monday,
I went ahead and installed for the rest, so now all of our payroll sites
have r1464 installed.  I hope you'll agree that was the right thing
to do.  The release hadn't yet been officially issued but clearly it
was urgent for the real world.  There are no functional changes,
and the only thing you might notice is that on the pages
displayed by the modified include members, a comment line
appears, displaying the number of the release in which it was
modified.  Based on our successful experience, Base issued
the modifications today.

   bvb