• Where Does SAP On IBM i Go From Here?

  January 15, 2020 Alex Woodie

  In Monday’s issue of The Four Hundred, we covered some of the challenges that SAP has created for itself by having two very different mainstream ERP suites (see “SAP Sending Mixed Messages on ERP Platform Support.”) On the one hand, it wants to move forward with S/4 HANA, but on the other hand, it doesn’t have all the features that exist in the older Business Suite. That puts customers who run Business Suite on IBM i in a bit of a bind.

  HANA debuted in 2010 as an in-memory columnar database for handling online application processing (OLAP) workloads. In …

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• Update On Migration Of developerWorks Content

  January 15, 2020 Alex Woodie

  On New Year’s Day, IBM fulfilled its promise to turn off the developerWorks Connections website, which hosted technical content posted by members of the IBM i community. But before it hit the “delete” button, Big Blue worked with content owners to migrate the most active content to other websites, to redirect browser traffic, and to archive the rest.

  IBM made good on its previous promise to ensure that no content was left behind when it permanently shuttered the popular developerWorks Connections website. It was forced to make that promise after it caused an uproar in October, when it announced that …

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• SoftLanding Turbo Charges IBM i Disk Utility

  January 15, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Data storage volumes are doubling every 12 to 18 months for the average organization, which means it’s more important than ever to keep on top of production storage resources. On the IBM i platform, a new release of the Supermon Disk product from SoftLanding Systems should help organizations monitor disk usage.

  Regular maintenance of production storage environments is critical to ensuring smooth operations. On the IBM i server, where disk storage and memory combine to form one single-level storage pool accessible by programs, it’s perhaps even more critical to keep DASD below a certain utilization threshold (usually about 85 percent). …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, January 15

  January 15, 2020 Jenny Thomas

  Welcome back! For many of us, this is the first real work week of the new year, full of possibilities and ambitions as we steam ahead into 2020. But just because 2019 is now in the rearview doesn’t mean we can’t take a look back at what a year it was. IT Jungle’s own Alex Woodie recently revisited the biggest IBM i stories of last year, and it’s a fun read and reminder of all that happened during our previous trip around the sun. For a peek into the future, don’t miss IT Jungle editor in chief Timothy Prickett Morgan …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 22, Number 2

  January 15, 2020 Doug Bidwell

  As you well know, there is an issue with LPARs that are hanging on machines that have the latest Technology Refreshes applied to IBM i 7.3 and IBM i 7.4 in cases where the Hardware Management Console (HMC) is not managing the partitions. The details of the issue with the Technology Refreshes are outlined in APAR MA48101, and what it means is that a guest partition created with Virtual Partition Manager (VPM) inside SST or Integrated Virtualization Manager (IVM) will hang on IPL after the apply of the TRs. This gets real elaborate, so we strongly suggest you review …

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• There’s Always A New Last Laugh With Legacy

  January 13, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  On my bookshelf beside my desk is a shelf that has all of my relevant AS/400 books and copies of the first decade of The Four Hundred, back when it was a monthly newsletter printed on paper. Sometimes, when I get stuck for ideas, I page through my history and yours, and I am often amazed at the wealth of information that myself and my colleagues – as well as many, many sources – helps us to create. AS/400s were a lot more expensive than IBM i machines, and helping people save money was our primary mission, and there …

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• SAP Sending Mixed Messages On ERP Platform Support

  January 13, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Thousands of SAP Business Suite customers around the world are awaiting clarification from the German software giant about whether their chosen ERP software will continue to run on their chosen platform in five years. SAP is strongly hinting that it may move forward just with S/4 HANA, which at the moment is a Linux-only affair. But its actions suggest a more diverse array of databases and operating systems may be accommodated in the future.

  Questions about SAP’s intentions originated with a statement it made in 2014. At that time, SAP announced that it would fully support its current flagship …

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• Guru: Formatting Numbers and Dates/Times/Timestamps in SQL

  January 13, 2020 Paul Tuohy

  In this article, I want to share with you an SQL scalar function that I happen to have been using quite a bit recently. At times, when using an SQL select statement, you may want to format a number or date. Something along the same lines as using the %EDITC or %EDITW built in functions in RPG or the EDTCDE or EDTWRD keywords in DDS. In SQL we can use the VARCHAR_FORMAT or TO_CHAR (they are synonyms for each other – both work exactly the same way) scalar function to provide similar functionality.

  Since they are synonyms for each other, …

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• As I See It: Digital Trafficking

  January 13, 2020 Victor Rozek

  The Constitution and the Bill of Rights contain many fine words but “privacy” is not among them. At best the right to privacy is implied in the 4th Amendment, which protects against unreasonable search and seizure, and the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment that protects against the arbitrary denial of life, liberty, or property.

  One would think that the systematic and deliberate tracking of our movements would constitute an unreasonable search and seizure or, at the very least, an infringement on our liberty. But the founding fathers could not have conceived of a technology that digitized human beings …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 22, Number 1

  January 13, 2020 Doug Bidwell

  We want to remind you once again about the LPARs that are hanging on machines that have the latest Technology Refreshes applied to IBM i 7.3 and IBM i 7.4 in cases where the Hardware Management Console (HMC) is not managing the partitions. The details of the issue with the Technology Refreshes are outlined in APAR MA48101, which is essentially a bug report that warns customers of an issue with the software stack and oftentimes gives hints about when and how it will be fixed.

  Here is the issue in a nutshell: IPL-SRCC6003962-WAIT Hang with IBM i 7.3 with …

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• Participate In The 2020 IBM i Marketplace Survey Webcast

  January 13, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Every fall for the past six years, HelpSystems puts out the call for the IBM i community to participate in its annual survey of the base so we can find out what is going on out there in your shops. And then as the new year just gets going, the company hosts a webinar that goes over the results of the survey with commentary from a bunch of people.

  Tom Huntington, the executive vice president of technical solutions at HelpSystems, will host the webinar, and I plan to attend as do two familiar IBMers and a new one. That would …

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• Guru Classic: iSphere Plug-in Expands RSE/RDi Toolset

  January 8, 2020 Susan Gantner

  My series of three Guru tips on the free iSphere plug-in first appeared in 2015. Since I still find that most RDi users haven’t heard of it, I’ve decided to repeat the series as Guru Classics. I’ve made a few updates to this first one in the series due to enhancements made to both RDi and iSphere in the intervening years.

  Followers of my Guru tips know that I’m a big RDi fan. These days I would be lost trying to write or maintain RPG code without things like RDi’s Outline, Error feedback, editor filtering, and Undo. But you know …

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• Guru Classic: A Bevy Of BIFs – %ScanRpl (Scan And Replace)

  January 8, 2020 Jon Paris

  This gem of a BIF was introduced with the V7.1 release and so was not available some five years ago when I wrote my original Bevy series of tips. Now that most active development shops are running V7.1 and later it seems a good candidate for a “Classic” to remind readers of its capabilities. The intervening years have not dimmed its utility and it remains one of my all-time favorite BIFs.

  Simply put, %ScanRpl will search a target string for a given character sequence and replace it with another. Not only that but it will then continue to search through …

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• Guru Classic: Don’t Ignore the View

  January 8, 2020 Paul Tuohy

  Author’s Note: This article was originally published in April 2009. The use of DDL and embedded SQL have come a long way since then but the basic premise of the article still applies. I have removed the embedded SQL example using a SELECT * since this is a style that I no longer recommend (from the point of view of self-documenting code, possible performance gains and breaking old habits of thinking in records). I also changed the example of reformatting a numeric date column to use a DATES table as opposed to functions (a faster and better approach). I removed …

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• Observations, Priorities, And Desires For IBM i In 2020

  January 6, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With age and wisdom comes a certain kind of calm expectation that does not necessarily put one in the frame of mind to make prognostications as much as making some observations, laying out priorities, and expressing desires. Making predictions is really about placing qualified and intelligent bets, more like hunting than the slower, measured pace of agriculture, which is about planning and fostering growth.

  As I approach the new decade, I am less in the mood to don my wizard hat with its moons and stars on it and to rub the dust off the crystal ball on my desk …

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• Reading The IBM i Tea Leaves For 2020

  January 6, 2020 Alex Woodie

  When the calendar flipped over from 2019 last week, the IBM i platform began its fifth decade, an amazing feat of longevity in our current age of punctuated technological equilibrium. As we set out to foresee what may become of IBM i in 2020, we have a couple of avenues we can take.

  On the one hand, we can try to guess what sorts of moves IBM will make with the platform. IBM isn’t in the habit of telegraphing its moves too far in advance, so this would be an act of speculation. On the other hand, we can look …

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• Guru 2020: Suggested Resolutions, One Prediction

  January 6, 2020 Ted Holt

  Do you eat candy made of underwear? How are your telepathy and teleportation skills? How long ago did you give up eating? How many choppers are on the family helipad? Is your chauffeur a gorilla? Read about these and other bizarre predictions for 2020 here.

  A new year is invariably accompanied by resolutions and predictions. I don’t intend to make any of either. However, if you’re into making resolutions, I’ve got some suggestions that you can take or leave, as you wish. As for predictions, I’ve got one that can’t miss.

  For RPG programmers who are still looking for …

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• From Integrated Systems To Disaggregated And Composable

  January 6, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As IBM midrange shops well know, there used to be a number of suppliers of integrated minicomputer systems that included all of the hardware and software that was needed by a company to automate its bookkeeping and operations. Many of them – notably the Hewlett Packard 3000 and the Digital VAX and Alpha lines – are gone, and the IBM i on Power platform, the descendant of the System/38 and the AS/400, is in many ways the last of its kind.

  But there are other kinds of integrated systems, and we have discussed the market for these machines – included …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Numbers 51 And 52

  January 6, 2020 Doug Bidwell

  The PTFs keep rolling even through the holidays, so this is our time to get caught up with the last two weeks of patches in 2019 as the new year is beginning.

  In PTF Number 51, we dug a little deeper into the issue we found out about just as The Four Hundred was going on hiatus where LPARs are hanging on machines that have the latest Technology Refreshes applied to IBM i 7.3 and IBM i 7.4 in cases where the Hardware Management Console (HMC) is not managing the partitions.

  The details of the issue with the Technology Refreshes …

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• Participate In The 2020 IBM i Marketplace Survey Webcast

  January 6, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Every fall for the past six years, HelpSystems puts out the call for the IBM i community to participate in its annual survey of the base so we can find out what is going on out there in your shops. And then as the new year just gets going, the company hosts a webinar that goes over the results of the survey with commentary from a bunch of people.

  Tom Huntington, the executive vice president of technical solutions at HelpSystems, will host the webinar, and I plan to attend as do two familiar IBMers — Alison Butterill, IBM i product …

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