• Big Blue Finally Brings IBM i To Its Own Public Cloud

  February 18, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Well, that took quite a long time. After what seems like eons of nudging and cajoling and pushing, IBM is making the IBM i operating system and its integrated database management system, as well as the application development tools and other systems software, available on its self-branded IBM Cloud public cloud.

  Big Blue previewed its plans to bring both IBM i and AIX to the IBM Cloud at its annual Think conference in Las Vegas, on scale out machines aimed at small and medium businesses as well as to customers who want to run clusters of machines, and on scale …

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• Building A Positive Culture of Learning On IBM i

  February 18, 2019 Alex Woodie

  How do you motivate IBM i programmers to keep learning new technologies, long after they have mastered the RPG skills they use the most? There’s no simple answer to that question, which was the topic of a recent conversation IT Jungle had with PHP on IBM i guru Alan Seiden and Heidi Schmidt, the head of PKS Software.

  IBM i shops face several interrelated problems when it comes to their personnel, which traditionally is one of the biggest line items in the IT budget. These challenges include: the aging of IBM i professionals; the retirements of baby boomer-aged personnel; the …

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• Guru: Change XML Elements in SQL

  February 18, 2019 Paul Tuohy

  Over the last few years, it has become more common to store XML or JSON in a column in a table. Whereas SQL provides all the necessary functions to construct/deconstruct XML or JSON from/to relational data, it does not provide an easy means to change the contents of an element. In this article, I am going to demonstrate a technique for changing the contents of an XML element using an SQL stored procedure.

  Just to provide some background, I was recently working on a project where DB2 XML Extender functionality was being replaced with the standard XML functions. The project …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, February 18

  February 18, 2019 Jenny Thomas

  I’m sure you’ve been the recipient of a backward compliment (or maybe even inadvertently given one before). The IBM i has definitely had its share of unintentional insults, as recently as our top story below where our beloved platform was dubbed “likely the safest and most powerful server platform you’ve never heard of.” Awkward for those of us already in the know, but the intention here was good and we’ll definitely take the props where we can get them. In fact, IBM had a lot of good news to share this week, which we have wrangled and condensed for you …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Number 7

  February 18, 2019 Doug Bidwell

  As you will see in the most recent IBM i PTF Guide, there was not a lot going on this week. It looks like somebody at IBM might be taking some time off. That’s the way it goes some weeks, and we call it a win if there is not a lot of patching that is going on. That said, there are probably a bunch of you that might be a little bit behind in applying PTFs – this kind of thing happens. And if you ever get truly behind and need some help sorting it all out, don’t …

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• Guru Classic: Triggers – Allow Repeated Change

  February 13, 2019 Paul Tuohy

  Author’s Note: This article was originally published in November 2013. This has always been one of my favorite techniques for data modernization. I only wish I had thought of it back in the days of Y2K! 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 2013. 

  Recently, during a modernization project, I have been making use of the Allow Repeated Change (ALWREPCHG) option with before triggers. ALWREPCHG allows a before trigger to make changes to the record being inserted or updated, and that lets …

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• Guru Classic: Who Needs Custom Perspectives In RDi?

  February 13, 2019 Susan Gantner

  I often talk to people who are confused about RDi perspectives, so I thought this two-part series on why and how to create and use your own custom perspectives would be a good one to update. Very little has changed since the original publication of this first part, but I’ve updated the screen shots and addressed one or two small differences in recent releases. This version assumes you are running at least RDi 9.5

  Who needs custom perspectives in RDi? Just about everyone. At least everyone could probably benefit from them. As you know if you’ve read my earlier tips, …

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• Guru Classic: A Bevy of BIFs — %CHAR, %EDITC and %EDITW

  February 13, 2019 Jon Paris

  Author’s Note: The reason I chose this particular tip to revisit was that a similar question came up on one of the RPG web forums the other day. The questioner was looking for an easy way to edit a numeric field to include the use of colons as separators. Because the answer involves the use of %EditW I have added a simple example of its use at the end of this tip.

  “I need to convert a numeric value into a character string. How do I . . . ?” This question is often asked by RPGers as they face …

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• Settling In With IBM i For The Long Haul

  February 11, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If nothing else, the IBM i platform has exhibited extraordinary longevity. One might even say legendary longevity, if you want to take its history all the way back to the System/3 minicomputer from 1969. This is the real starting point in the AS/400 family tree and this is when Big Blue, for very sound legal and technical and marketing reasons, decided to fork its products to address the unique needs of large enterprises (with the System/360 mainframe and its follow-ons) and small and medium businesses (starting with the System/3 and moving on through the System/34, System/32, System/38, and System/36 in …

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• Domino And Notes 10 Finally Come To IBM i

  February 11, 2019 Alex Woodie

  They say good things come to those who wait. The IBM i community has waited over 10 years for a new release of Domino and Notes, and they were rewarded last week when IBM announced version 10 is now available on IBM i.

  Domino and Notes 10 is the first major release of the server component of the business collaboration platform since Domino 8.5 was released way back in 2008 (version 9 was a minor release). The future of the platform was up in the air for a while, and many people who have dedicated a chunk of their careers …

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• Guru: Open Access To The Rescue

  February 11, 2019 Jon Paris

  Recently I came upon a couple of questions on internet lists asking for an easy method to create flat files in the IFS. Not CSV files, but rather simple text files where individual data items are in fixed character positions. Various somewhat convoluted solutions were offered to the requestors, but to me this problem shouted “Open Access!”

  So, I set about quickly building an Open Access (OA) handler to perform the task. I find OA really useful for this kind of job because, once the handler is written, creating these kinds of files in the future become a trivial task, …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, February 11

  February 11, 2019 Jenny Thomas

  The cloud is booming for IBM, which has recently said it has closed $3 billion in cloud deals already this year. The latest deal is covered in the first Top Story below, and Big Blue has got to be big happy to see the its cloud investments paying off. IBM also had more news on the AI front, revealing plans for a new AI research hub in New York. Now is a good time for you to start thinking about investing in yourself. There are plenty of good opportunities listed in our Chats, Webinars, Seminars, Shows, and Other Happenings section …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Number 6

  February 11, 2019 Doug Bidwell

  In this week’s issue, take note of the Defective PTFs for your release (see details below) with an issue of Ethernet frames being dropped running on IBM i 7.2 and IBM i 7.3.

  MF65215 – SAL Cannot Search From or To 20 – This is new in the Hardware and related PTFs group:

  • V7R3 SF99875
  • V7R2 SF99775
  • V7R1 SF99705

  If you’re migrating from Power8 to Power9, you are gonna want to get the latest HIPER group. There is a HIPER fix for:

  • 7.3 MF65605
  • 7.2 MF65606

  This fixes a subsystem startup failure after migration. You are gonna want it!

  New …

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• More IBM i Predictions For 2019

  February 6, 2019 Alex Woodie

  We kicked off our 2019 soothsaying last week with predictions from IBM i leaders on what the New Year will bring. We keep the ball rolling this week with another batch of predictions from our friends around the IBM i community.

  According to Alison Butterill, IBM‘s the program director for offering management for IBM i, the platform will build off the momentum generated with last year’s 30th anniversary celebrant.

  “The excitement begun in 2018 as we highlighted client innovation around the world will continue into 2019,” Butterill says. “The momentum continues to grow as clients are looking at ways …

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• Meet The 2019 Champions For IBM i

  February 6, 2019 Alex Woodie

  It’s a new year, which means a new crop of champions has emerged from IBM. More than 600 souls can call themselves IBM Champions this year, but only 64 identify as IBM Champions for Power Systems. We whittled away the AIX and Linux experts to leave you with the folks who will lead the IBM i charge in 2019.

  IBM does not have a specific category for IBM i Champions. Big Blue breaks out its System z leaders, along with champion categories for Data & Analytics, Cloud, Collaboration Solutions, Storage, Watson IoT, Blockchain, and Security.

  For the Champion program, IBM …

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• Inside The Latest ALL400s Report

  February 6, 2019 Alex Woodie

  In early 2018, John Rockwell started a survey from his ALL400s website in an attempt to glean more information about the state of midrange community. Many of the questions are about which products IBM i professionals use, but the survey also digs into other aspects of the relationships that people and organizations have with the platform, including plans to migrate off IBM i.

  According to the latest ALL400s survey of the midrange community, more IBM i shops say they have no plans to move off the platform. It was a small increase — from 57.5 percent last April who said …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, February 6

  February 6, 2019 Jenny Thomas

  AI. AI. AI. That is not the chorus of a new song, but the sound of the IT tech news this week. But it isn’t just our industry that is hyper focused on artificial intelligence. If you watched the Superbowl this past Sunday, perhaps you noticed the trend of commercials featuring robots and AI nods, including spots from TurboTax, Michelob Ultra, and Amazon’s Alexa. While entertaining, it is also demonstrates how pervasive AI has become in everyday life. Since there’s no escaping AI, at least we can learn from what others are doing as your company tackles how to best …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Number 5

  February 6, 2019 Doug Bidwell

  In the latest iteration of the IBM i PTF Guide, you will see that there is a new Database Group for IBM i 7.3. Also, you will find that IBM Navigator for i is affected by the security vulnerability that is posted in CVE-2019-4040, which you can read about more at this link. The patches relating to this security vulnerability are handled by latest group for the HTTP server for IBM i 7.2 and 7.3.

  As for new links in the Guide  this week, there are none as yet – I am still catching up.

  Here is a …

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• IBM i Has Been Getting With The Program For Years

  February 4, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There are many things that one could constructively criticize IBM about when it comes to the Power Systems platform running the IBM i operating system. But, in recent years at least, one of those things would not be – and could not be – that the company has not done enough to embrace the most important elements of the modern programming toolbox.

  In fact, the company has done and increasingly good job of embracing and extending the compilers, interpreters, frameworks, and models of the programming languages that have gone mainstream since Java first took the stage at the beginning of …

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• One Repository To Rule The Source – And Object – Code

  February 4, 2019 Floyd Del Muro

  (Sponsored Content) The concept of a single repository for source is not necessarily a new one. When I interviewed with ARCAD back in 2011, I did so at the at the Rational conference called Innovate in Orlando. The research and development team and our chief technology officer were already in dialogue with IBM to resell ARCAD technology alongside its Rational development suite, adding power to Rational Team Concert that development organizations could effectively have a similar repository for IBM i and open source applications.

  At the time, RTC supported the open source world very well, just like Git …

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