The IT Jungle

These POWERUp Sessions Are About the Recent IBM i Announcement

May 15, 2019 Alex Woodie

Disneyland didn’t complete construction of Star Wars Galaxy’s Edge in time for next week’s POWERUp conference. But luckily for you, IBM did finalize its IBM i announcement soon enough for COMMON’s annual extravaganza, making next week’s show in Anaheim, California, a great chance for you to learn about the new releases of the operating system, including IBM i 7.4 and 7.3 TR6.

According to COMMON’s online session guide, there are at least 16 sessions at POWERUp 19 having to do with IBM i 7.4, IBM i 7.3 Technology Refresh 6 (TR6), or the new software that will arrive with …
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IBM Bolsters ACS with Database and Administrative Goodies

May 15, 2019 Alex Woodie

Amid the many enhancements that IBM has delivered with IBM i 7.4 and IBM i 7.3 TR6 is a new release of Access Client Solutions (ACS), which has become the go-to client interface that many IBM i professionals use to access the system for a variety of tasks. Database engineers and system administrators are the big winners with this release.

There’s no denying that IBM delivered a whopper of release with IBM i 7.4 and its sidekick, IBM i 7.3 TR6. There’s been so much news – starting with the availability and security enhancements in Db2 Mirror and Authority Collection …
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Raz-Lee Offloads Virus Scanning from IBM i with ICAP

May 15, 2019 Alex Woodie

Raz-Lee Security is providing IBM i shops another option when it comes to anti-virus software by offering an ICAP client that offloads CPU-intensive virus scanning activities to an external server. The new solution is being sold as an extension to Raz-Lee’s existing Anti-Virus solution.

While the IBM i operating system is essentially immune to PC viruses, they still pose a threat to IBM i shops, which typically have a smattering of Windows desktops and servers on the network. The problem is that Windows viruses (and assorted other malware) can infect the IBM i server’s Windows-like Integrated File System (IFS), where …
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Four Hundred Monitor, May 15

May 15, 2019 Jenny Thomas

This weekend, the IT Jungle team will head to Anaheim to cover POWERUp 2019. It’s always good to get out of our chairs and get our feet on the ground for some face time with our IBM i community. We hope to see you around the House of the Mouse but if you can’t make it out to the conference being held at the Disneyland resort, just stay tuned. We will be bringing you all of the latest news and happenings directly from the show floor. Until then, check out all the latest news and happenings around our industry at …
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IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Number 19

May 15, 2019 Doug Bidwell

So, here’s the deal: There is a new IBM i 7.3 Cume! 19116! C9116730! Have fun with the latest cumulative release on the newest shipping variant of IBM i, all rolled up and ready to rock. Also, SAP on i PTF links have been added to each release and, by the way, I installed Technology Refresh 6 for IBM i 7.3 earlier this week at a customer site and there were no issues, which is a good thing indeed. There is also a new DB2 Group for IBM i 7.3.

Be sure to check out the SAP on i Blog, …
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IBM Bolsters RPG And COBOL Development

May 13, 2019 Alex Woodie

Amid the many and varied enhancements that IBM rolled out last month for its IBM i operating system was a collection of improvements for its core development tooling, including the Eclipse-based Rational Developer for i (RDi) as well as Rational Development Studio for i, which contains the RPG and COBOL compilers.

Let’s start with the RPG and COBOL compilers in Rational Development Studio for i, since updates to these strategic pieces are more infrequent than the updates to RDi, which shares a common base with integrated development environments (IDEs) for other operating systems and therefore updated more frequently.

The biggest …
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NodeRun Is Node.js For Everyone

May 13, 2019 Brian May

(Sponsored Content) Working for a software development company like Profound Logic, I have the privilege of working on very interesting and exciting projects, both internally and with my customers. My days are filled with both the mundane and the exciting, but luckily, I have more of the latter than the former. I want to take a few minutes of your time to tell you about a project that has me as excited as I have been in quite a while.

Have you wanted to experiment with learning Node.js on IBM i, or any other platform? Have you …
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Guru: Emulate Control Break Reporting With DB2 For i SQL

May 13, 2019 Michael Sansoterra

When generating ad hoc user reports, it’s often the case that developers don’t have the time or luxury to write a high-level language program or to use a reporting tool such as DB2 Web Query or Crystal Reports to format the data appropriately. But when a user is given a raw dump of a SELECT statement’s result set in Excel, it can be quite ugly to wade through and format.

The user may have to do things like add total rows or remove duplicate values, which can be quite time consuming. Thankfully, DB2 for i SQL offers a way to …
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Evermore A Community Of Common Interest

May 13, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

When you write as much as I do, and for as long as I have, you can accidentally get caught in a path of your own making that you have forgotten you have cut through the woods before. With the POWERUp 2019 conference coming up next week, formerly known as COMMON, I have a lot of things on my mind, particularly with the passing last month of Hesh Wiener, the founding editor of The Four Hundred, and of the passing last August of Dan Burger, our executive managing editor.

It is not a coincidence that the opening …
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Retranslation Could Boost Performance

May 13, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

There are so many kinds of genius embedded into the IBM midrange line that it is hard to know where to begin when discussing all of these interconnected ideas and layers. But perhaps the simplest way to encapsulate them all is that the System/38 and AS/400 minicomputers and their follow-ons sought to abstract away and mask some of the more complex aspects of a modern system so that programmers could focus on business logic and system administrators could focus at a much higher level, too.

One of the key differentiators of these IBM midrange platforms, and one of the hallmarks …
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Does Db2 Mirror Kill The Market for Third Party HA?

May 6, 2019 Alex Woodie

IBM launched Db2 Mirror for i two weeks ago to great acclaim, as the clustering technology puts IBM i on par with how most other major systems provide continuous availability. But will Db2 Mirror destroy the platform’s heritage of high availability solutions? IT Jungle asked IBM and the biggest providers of logical replication solutions, and the answer is no. Here’s why.

The first thing to understand about Db2 Mirror is that, at heart, it’s a database clustering technology. IBM figured out a way to make a single instance of Db2 for i run on two separate systems, in an active-active …
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Drilling Down Into Db2 Mirror for IBM i

May 6, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

We did our initial coverage of the new Db2 Mirror for the IBM i operating system’s integrated database two weeks ago, and now it is time to dig in a little deeper. Elsewhere in this week’s issue of The Four Hundred, we have gotten feedback from the suppliers of high availability clustering and disaster recovery software for the IBM i platform as to how Db2 Mirror compete with as well as complements their wares. And in this story, we will be digging a little deeper into Db2 Mirror itself.

As we explained, Db2 Mirror creates an active-active database …
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Guru: Open Access To The Rescue – The Next Step

May 6, 2019 Jon Paris

I recently wrote a tip on using an Open Access handler to enable the creation of flat files in the IFS. In that version of the handler I generated a generic file name and used hard-coded record delimiters and code page settings. I mentioned at the time that I would normally supply these values at run time. In this follow-on tip I describe how the handler can be modified to use the Open Access User Parameter to facilitate this.

The User Parameter is simply specified as a second parameter to the HANDLER keyword. It can be a simple variable or, …
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As I See It: A Taxing Situation

May 6, 2019 Victor Rozek

A few weeks ago, millions of us took a deep, resentment-laden breath before signing our name to a check and sending it off to the federal government. Taxes, the eternal pebble in the workingperson’s shoe, are as unpopular as they are necessary, and remain the subject of endless debate over who should pay and how much.

In a system rigged to favor those with money-wielding lobbyists, IT professionals are part of that vast pool of middle-class dupes who neither make so little as to be exempt from taxes, nor so much as to be able to avoid paying them altogether. …
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IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Number 18

May 6, 2019 Doug Bidwell

In this iteration of the IBM i PTF Guide, you will find that there is a new set of PTF patches for the TCP/IP Group for both IBM i 7.2 and IBM i 7.3, and also new HIPER and Security Groups for the big three current release, which are of course IBM i 7.1, IBM i 7.2, and IBM i 7.3. IBM i 7.4 won’t be here until the AS/400’s 31st birthday on June 21.

Here are the new or updated links in the Guide this week:
- System IBM i Home Page
- System IBM i License Topics
- Open Source Midnight
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How IBM i 7.4 Improves Security

May 1, 2019 Alex Woodie

The unveiling of Db2 Mirror may have gotten the lion’s share of attention with last week’s introduction of IBM i enhancements. But IBM has also given its customer base some significant security upgrades with the new releases of IBM i, including enhancements to the Authority Collection and support for the latest over-the-wire encryption protocol.

“Our big things are around those two main themes – availability as well as security,” says Alison Butterill, IBM i product offering manager at IBM. “Those are the two main themes. But we have lots of things across the board.”

IBM gave customers significant new user-focused …
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R Comes To i

May 1, 2019 Alex Woodie

IBM is now officially supporting the language R with its IBM i operating system, the company announced last week. The open source language, which has long been a favorite of data scientists, statisticians, and others involved with scientific computing, gives IBM i an immediate boost when it comes to data mining and machine learning.

The R language was originally developed 25 years ago by a pair of computer science professors, Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman, at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. The software, which was developed largely in C and Fortran, was based largely on S, a programming language …
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Original Refocuses on IBM i Test Automation

May 1, 2019 Alex Woodie

Original Software never left the IBM i software market, though it might have seemed that way to some people. But thanks to a new website devoted to exploring issues, challenges, and solutions on the topic of IBM i test automation, the British software company is redoubling its efforts around the midrange platform.

“We really never un-engaged with it, to be fair,” says Original Software COO George Wilson says of IBM i. “We’ve kind of widened the radar a bit. That was probably 15 years ago. We didn’t want to limit ourselves to the IBM midrange marketplace. What we’ve just done …
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Four Hundred Monitor, May 1

May 1, 2019 Jenny Thomas

Unless you are living under a rock (ha, ha), you probably have some concern about the planet and preserving it for future generations. Maybe you have a composter, or drive an electric car, or you recycle. Whatever your contribution might be, I like to think it helps. And it is nice to see that the planet is also on the radar of tech giants like IBM and Dell Computers, both of which have recently joined a challenge to make a commitment to sustainability. Find out more in our top stories below, and don’t forget to visit our calendar at the …
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IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Number 17

May 1, 2019 Doug Bidwell

This shouldn’t be news to anyone in IBM i Land, and especially not to readers of IT Jungle, but just in case you managed to miss it, IBM i 7.4 has been announced (219-214)! You can get the details here. This week’s guide also brings news for Hardware and Related PTF group for 7.3, 7.2, and 7.1, as well as MQ for IBM i – v7.1.0/v8.0.0/v9.0.0/v9.1.0 for 7.3 and 7.2.

See the worksheet in our guide for information on IBM i 7.4 respin/resave. And there are also links to download for the new ACS, Version 1.1.8.2.

The latest Security …
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