• Guru Classic: Automatic Or Static Storage?

  January 16, 2019 Susan Gantner

  Author’s Note: This tip was first published in August 2008. One thing that has changed in the intervening 10-plus years is that I find a lot more RPGers regularly using subprocedures now. Something that hasn’t really changed much is that many of those using subprocedures still don’t fully understand the behavioral differences between automatic and static storage. The concepts and handling of automatic versus static storage haven’t really changed. So the only modifications I’ve made for this reprise of the tip is to update the style of the code example.

  If you write RPG subprocedures, you should know about the …

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• Guru Classic: A Bevy of BIFs – %SCAN and %CHECK

  January 16, 2019 Jon Paris

  Many RPG programmers seem to get confused about the usage and operation of a number of built-in functions (BIFs). In particular the BIFs %XLATE, %REPLACE, %SCAN, and %CHECK seem to cause a lot of confusion. In this tip, I focus on %CHECK and %SCAN. I decided to re-visit this particular tip because of the recent introduction of %SCAN’s companion BIF %SCANR and a related enhancement to %SCAN itself. More on this later.

  The %SCAN BIF has been with us since V3R7, when it was introduced along with %EDITC and %EDITW, to improve string handling. %CHECK, on the other hand, is …

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• Guru Classic: Call Again And Again And Again . . .

  January 16, 2019 Paul Tuohy

  Author’s Note: This article was originally published in October 2011 and recently came to mind when I had a discussion with a programmer bemoaning the fact that he could not (so he thought) have a recursive process in RPG. The content of the article has been updated for free form RPG and some of the coding enhancements that have been introduced, into RPG, since 2009. 

  In programming terms, recursion is the process whereby a function may call itself. Traditionally, this is something we are not used to in RPG. Programs and subroutines cannot call themselves. Or if you did somehow …

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• Security Posture Mixed As Feds Say ‘Shields Up’

  January 14, 2019 Alex Woodie

  “Raise your shield.” That’s the message the Federal Government sent to American businesses last week as part of a new cybersecurity awareness campaign. But according to a recent survey of security professionals by Syncsort, the majority of enterprises, including IBM i shops, are confident in the security protections that are already in place. The big question: Have they actually done enough?

  The National Counterintelligence and Security Center (NCSC) kicked off a new security awareness campaign last week called “Know the Risk, Raise Your Shield.” The NCSC says that foreign intelligence entities are actively targeting information, assets, and technologies” that are …

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• IBM Boosts Prices On Lab Services Engagements

  January 14, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Happy New Year, you have a price increase! On January 1, in announcement letter 319-030, IBM announced a pricing action and you might have not even noticed it, since it was not presented to customers in the normal wrap up of product announcements, withdrawals, and price changes that Big Blue puts out every week. We certainly didn’t see it mentioned. At any event, because we don’t trust that IBM puts everything out at once, we often periodically take a look back in the archive to see if “new” old announcements pop up.

  In any event, on January 1, IBM …

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• Guru: Easy Date Difference

  January 14, 2019 Ted Holt

  Hey, Ted:

  The dates in our database are stored as seven-digit packed-decimal values in the common CYYMMDD format. In 2018 I wrote an SQL query that reported the number of days between two dates, but it quit calculating properly as soon as it started using 2019 dates. Can you tell me the proper way to find the difference between two dates in days?

  –Becki

  I don’t know if “the” proper way exists or not, Becki, but I can show you how to do the required calculation. SQL has some handy built-in functions that address your problem.

  The DAYS function returns …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, January 14

  January 14, 2019 Jenny Thomas

  With 2018 firmly behind us, we are already looking into the future to guess what we might look ahead to in the months ahead. Our very own Editor-In-Chief Tim Prickett Morgan will be leading this charge when he joins a panel of experts, including IBMers Alison Butterill and Ian Jarman, to dissect the results of the 2019 IBM i marketplace survey. Tune in to this webinar to hear (instead of read) what Tim thinks is next for our little ecosystem. You can find the link in the “Chats, Webinars, Seminars, Shows, and Other Happenings” section below.

  Top Stories From Outside

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Number 1

  January 14, 2019 Doug Bidwell

  The new thing is that it is 2019, and I am convinced it will be a better year.

  In Volume 21, Number 1 of the IBM i PTF Guide, the first of the new year, there is a whole bunch going on. There are HIPER groups and new patches for Db2 Web Query for i V2.2.1 all around on the current releases – that means IBM i 7.1, 7.2, and 7.3. And there is a new Backup and Recovery groups, a new HTTP group, and a new MGTools group for the newer IBM i 7.3 and 7.2 releases.

  The …

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• Listen In To The 2019 IBM i Marketplace Survey Webcast

  January 14, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Many of you took the survey last fall, and now it is time to go over the results and take the pulse of the IBM i customer base.

  On January 17, Tom Huntington, the executive vice president of technical solutions at HelpSystems, will host two webinars going over the results of the survey, and I plan to attend as do two other familiar IBMers – Alison Butterill, IBM i product offering manager, and Ian Jarman, who had that job before and is now an executive in the IBM Lab Services division – to talk it all out.

  This is the …

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• IBM’s Plan For Etching Power10 And Later Chips

  January 7, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last summer, GlobalFoundries, the chip making conglomerate comprised of the foundry businesses of AMD and IBM plus Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing, put the kibosh on its planned aggressive ramp of 7 nanometer chip making technologies. AMD and IBM, who both depended on GlobalFoundries for their server chip manufacturing, obviously knew well before this announcement that GlobalFoundries was going to be halting development and production ramp for 7 nanometers, so they were not left in as much of a lurch as it might seem.

  Lucky for both companies, there is more than one foundry that was trying to stay on the bleeding …

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• LANSA Bought By Software Conglomerate Idera

  January 7, 2019 Alex Woodie

  LANSA, one of the oldest independent software vendors targeting the IBM midrange server and arguably one of the most successful, has been acquired by Idera, a growing conglomerate of software companies that also owns Sencha, and which is owned in part by the same private equity firm behind HelpSystems.

  LANSA was founded in 1987 by Australian businessmen Peter Draney and Lyndsey Cattermole to create and sell software development tools for the IBM System/38. When IBM launched the AS/400 a year later, LANSA supported it with its fourth generation language (4GL) development environment. It hasn’t looked back, and today the company, …

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• Guru: Arranging Query Logic in DB2 for i Routines

  January 7, 2019 Michael Sansoterra

  Hey, Mike:

  We use a stored procedure to return the result set to Java and display the results to a screen. I would like to make this stored procedure put the result set into a temporary table and then do some processing on the temporary table. Is this possible and if so how can I achieve this? Thanks.

  Your dilemma is understandable: stored procedure result sets are great when data needs to be returned to a client. However, once generated, the result set cannot be joined, sorted, or stored in a temporary table. Thankfully, a user-defined table function (UDTF) allows …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, January 7

  January 7, 2019 Jenny Thomas

  The New Year is underway here in the Jungle. As much as we all appreciated (and needed) some downtime to reflect on last year and recharge for the months ahead, we are just as happy to be back delivering the news to our community. It turns out not everyone in the IBM i ecosystem has been on hiatus, as we see many informative webinars coming up this month and IBM CEO Ginni Rometty on deck to deliver the keynote at CES this week. We have a small favor to ask before you start digging back in to projects at work. …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 20, Numbers 50 And 51

  January 7, 2019 Doug Bidwell

  The Four Hundred was on hiatus for the last two weeks of December, so this week we wrap up the final 2018 editions of the IBM i PTF Guide. We will be picking up with 2019 in next week’s issue of the newsletter.

  In Volume 20, Number 50, of the IBM i PTF Guide, we learn about the new release of RDi – check the link in the guide for more and also check out this story that ran in The Four Hundred a few weeks ago. There were also new HIPER and Security group PTFs that …

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• All i Want For Christmas Is RDi Lite

  December 12, 2018 Alex Woodie

  All some IBM i community members wanted for the holidays was RDi Lite. Instead, they’re looking at IBM like the Grinch due to its decision not to offer a free, scaled-down version of the application development tool. What’s more, the community is expressing great displeasure at the manner in which IBM handled the matter through its Request for Enhancement (RFE) process.

  Hassan Farooqi kicked off the campaign for RDi Lite in August 2017, when he posted an RFE on the new IBM developerWorks website that’s designed to facilitate collaboration with its user communities by allowing them to submit ideas for …

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• Open Source Is the Future, So Where Does IBM i Fit In?

  December 12, 2018 Alex Woodie

  The IBM i server reached a milestone this year when it turned 30 years old, an amazing feat for a remarkable system that continues to provide computational value to tens of thousands of organizations around the world. But another birthday was celebrated this year that the IBM i community should take note of: The 20th anniversary of the beginning of the open source movement.

  Now, this birthday is a little bit questionable because open source software existed before 1998, of course. But the time is worth marking because an important meeting took place in Palo Alto, California, where the phrase …

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• Happy Holidays From IT Jungle

  December 12, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  And now we come, once again, to the holiday season here at IT Jungle. This coming year, which we are already planning for, we enter the 30th year of publishing news, tech tips, strategy, and tactics concerning the AS/400 and its progeny. It has been such an education for all of us, and a privilege and an honor to serve the AS/400, iSeries, System i, and IBM i communities all those years, as well as those many shops who hung back in the early years on the System/36 and System/38 platforms while we are thinking about it.

  We are …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, December 12

  December 12, 2018 Jenny Thomas

  This issue is officially our last of 2018. The end of a year is a time for reflection for many, and also a time for lists. Lists of the people who and things that stood out during the past 12 months. For the IT Jungle team, our year was defined by the loss our beloved Dan Burger. The three of us left behind remember him every day, and it would be remiss not to mention him here. Dan’s voice is missed not just in Monitor and The Four Hundred, but in our community. So as we recap this …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 20, Number 49

  December 12, 2018 Doug Bidwell

  Well, there is not much going on this week in IBM i PTF Land. There are no new groups, just a bunch of security vulnerabilities. To be precise, there is a Security Bulletin: Vulnerabilities CVE-2018-5407 and CVE-2018-0734 in OpenSSL that affect IBM i.

  The PTFs to fix these vulnerabilities are:

  • Release 7.2 and 7.3: SI68727
  • Release 7.1: SI68726

  For further information, check out this link.

  New Links this week: Sorry, nothing new here, either. Ho, Ho, Ho!

  The Guide at a glance: There are no new defectives this week (12/08), going for a new record! Here is the defective …

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• For Entry IBM Shops, Power9 Is About Performance And Security

  December 10, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Buying new systems costs money, often a lot of money relative to the size of the overall IT budget and the revenue and profit streams of the companies for which they work and, in essence, actually embody what that company really is. So in a sense, systems are always worth the money if they are actually letting people do their work properly.

  That said, there is always an argument to be made for doing an upgrade – often actually a migration because the system itself cannot easily or economically be upgraded – and another set of arguments for waiting a …

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