The IT Jungle

How Big Blue Stacks Up IBM i On Premises And On Cloud

June 24, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Here’s the $64,000 question: How much more does a slice of the IBM Cloud running IBM i cost compared to buying an on-premises machine with the same rough amount of capacity and installing IBM i on it and putting it into production? The answer to that question is: That all depends. But in general, as is the case with all infrastructures available on premises and on the cloud, the cloud is always more expensive.

This is not a surprise if you think about it for a moment. By using cloudy infrastructure, you are offloading the hassle of maintaining hardware and …
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ARCAD Brings Traditional 5250 Development Into DevOps Fold

June 24, 2019 Alex Woodie

IBM i developers who embrace modern DevOps techniques typically also use modern development tools, like RDi. Much of the IBM i world uses IBM’s latest development environment, but many have resisted. Now, thanks to new software from ARCAD Software, IBM i developers who work with older tools like PDM can also partake of the benefits of DevOps.

Getting older IBM i developers on board with the latest tools and techniques is a big priority for ARCAD Software, according to Alexandre Codinach, vice president of Americas for ARCAD Software, which included the new 5250 development capabilities with the launch of …
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Guru: When %SCAN Isn’t Sufficient

June 24, 2019 Ted Holt

The RPG %SCAN built-in function is wonderful! I can still remember having to look for a string within a string using RPG II on System/36. What an ordeal that was! Yet in some situations %SCAN can’t do all I need it to do. In those cases, I rely on the power of SQL.

One case where SQL comes in handy is when I need a case-insensitive scan. Instead of RPG’s %SCAN function, I use SQL’s LOCATE and UPPER functions, like this:
```
dcl-s  Description  char(48);
dcl-s  pos          int (10);

exec sql
   set :pos = locate ('HAMMER', upper(:Description));
```
If Description has the …
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Four Hundred Monitor, June 24

June 24, 2019 Jenny Thomas

There was a lot of excitement in the world of IBM i last week. Last Friday, June 21, marked the 31^st birthday of the IBM i. But you may have forgotten to celebrate because it also marked the release of IBM i 7.4. We have been writing about the coming 7.4 enhancements for weeks in The Four Hundred, and you can continue to follow us for the latest news as the rollout continues. For now, check out all the latest news and happenings around our industry at the links below, and don’t forget to check the calendar for …
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IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Number 25

June 24, 2019 Doug Bidwell

First of all, Happy 31st Birthday to the AS/400, which had its anniversary on June 21 when, absolutely not coincidentally, Big Blue shipped the latest and greatest IBM i 7.4 release of its operating system for the Power Systems platform. We have all been eagerly awaiting this new release because of the many new features it has, and we are just beginning to sink our teeth into it.

For your reference, I upgraded a system running IBM i 7.3 to IBM i 7.4 as soon as the new release was available, and just so you know, all the Java licensed …
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Guru Classic: Looking For Commitment, Part 1

June 19, 2019 Paul Tuohy

Author’s Note: This set of three articles was originally published in March of 2009. (See links in Related Stories below). As companies look to modernizing their applications, commitment control can play an integral role. In my next three Guru Classic articles, I will be updating the content of these articles for free-form RPG.

In this article, I will discuss what commitment control is, why you may want to use it, and the basic requirements for commitment control. In subsequent articles, I will look more closely at how commitment control works, different ways in which it can be implemented, …
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Guru Classic: Giving RDi a Split Personality

June 19, 2019 Susan Gantner

A commonly asked question by RDi newbies is: “How do I view source in split screen like I can in SEU?” The answer is that you can’t do it exactly like SEU, but then why would you want to? The RDi editor offers far greater flexibility.

The original version of my tip on this subject was published back in 2007. Back then, the toolset we know as RDi was called “WDSC”. Quite a lot of other changes have occurred within RDi as well. Originally, a specialized perspective was required to make this feature work well. Today’s RDi works well without …
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Guru Classic: Where Does Data Live? The New Basics

June 19, 2019 Jon Paris

Every time I teach some of the more recent additions to RPG, such as XML parsing or Open Access, I find that I need to include some “remedial” education on some of the data definition enhancements that have been made to the language over recent releases.

Most of these enhancements came into the language many years ago back in the days when D-specs were de rigueur, but if you had no immediate need for them, they may have passed you by. After all, even the most avid reader of this newsletter has probably forgotten most of what they read here …
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Pricing Revealed For IBM i Slices On IBM Cloud

June 17, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Today is the day. You can finally go out onto the IBM i Cloud and buy on-demand slices of Power-based systems from Big Blue itself and load up the IBM i operating system and integrated database and do actual work on it. And, if it floats your boat, you can run AIX partitions on the IBM Cloud, too, on the same Power S922 and Power E880 iron that IBM is making available and carving up with its homegrown PowerVM server virtualization hypervisor.

IBM revealed its plans for IBM i and AIX on its own public cloud, called the Power …
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Meet IBM’s New Security Architect for IBM i

June 17, 2019 Alex Woodie

Security isn’t just a feature of the IBM i operating system. It’s a fundamental concept that all IBM engineers share as they go about their business building and maintaining the system that’s used by over 120,000 organizations around the world. But when it comes to bringing it all together, there’s one person in charge of ensuring the operating system is as protected as it can be: the security architect.

The security architect job has been held by several folks in the IBM Rochester lab over the years, including Patrick Botz, Carol Woodbury, and Jeff Uehling. Botz and Woodbury now work …
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Guru: Use SQL to Generate Random Data

June 17, 2019 Ted Holt

Suppose I needed to generate a large database table with random data in order to adequately test the performance of an SQL query. Suppose that, for security reasons, I was not allowed to copy the production version of the table. Suppose that I needed a way to generate a lot — and I do mean a lot! — of random data. Suppose this scenario is not mere supposition.

Before an SQL query goes into production, it should be tested against a production-like dataset. Running a query against a test dataset of 25 rows (records) can produce unpleasant surprises when it’s …
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Four Hundred Monitor, June 17

June 17, 2019 Jenny Thomas

In celebration of Father’s Day, which was yesterday in the U.S., Forbes magazine posted an article with life lessons from five billionaires dads. Aside from the fact that most of us aren’t billionaires, we all have dads in our lives — whether it be your own father, or you are a father, or your spouse or friends are fathers, you probably don’t have to look far to find someone who is doing their best to be a good dad — and it seemed like a good thing to share since the advice could be useful in business and family matters. …
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IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Number 24

June 17, 2019 Doug Bidwell

We are all excited that IBM i 7.4 will be shipping at the end of the week, on the AS/400’s 31st birthday, but there is still the usual tweaking that needs to be done on the earlier and still-current releases thanks to the changes happening in PTF Land.

But to be honest, there is not that much this week. There is a new Java Group for IBM i 7.3, IBM i 7.2, and IBM i 7.1, and that’s about it.

Also, our apologies but in last week’s IBM i PTF Guide, we did a little “fake news,” but not on …
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Bucking the System: Higher Ed, Hold the College

June 12, 2019 Alex Woodie

Jim Buck spent 15 years teaching IBM i and RPG at Gateway Technical College in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Buck achieved great things there, finding hundreds of students good jobs around the country. But ultimately the college experience grew old for Buck, so he ventured out on his own. That’s when he founded his own online IBM i educational company, imPower Technologies.

That was two years ago, in the spring of 2017. After spending almost a year getting imPower Technologies up and running, Buck is teaching students IBM i and RPG once again. Currently he offers two courses: an introduction to IBM …
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CNX Welcomes 5250 Apps Into Valence Framework

June 12, 2019 Alex Woodie

For years, CNX has prided itself on providing the IBM i community with development tools for creating modern Web applications on the platform. The company looked unapologetically to the future, and encouraged customers to move on from their green-screen pasts. But in response to strong customer demand, the company has relented and decided to allow green screens into the framework via an innovative new Web-based emulator dubbed Fusion5250.

Fusion5250 is all about giving customers choice, CNX says. The software, which is a core new feature in Valence 5.2+, lets Valence customers access a modern application developed with CNX’s Nitro App …
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IBM i Gets a New Crop of ‘Fresh Faces’

June 12, 2019 Alex Woodie

The IBM i platform isn’t getting any younger, and neither are the thousands of individuals who work on it. But that doesn’t mean that platform as a whole should be marked by gray. To celebrate the viability of the platform’s ability to attract young people, IBM System Magazine just introduced its newest crop of “Fresh Faces.”

IBM System Magazine has been calling attention to the IBM i youth movement since 2016, when it debuted its original crop of Fresh Faces. Liam Allan was a member of that group as a teenager, and he has since gone on to build himself …
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Four Hundred Monitor, June 12

June 12, 2019 Jenny Thomas

You’ve probably heard the saying “there’s no such thing as bad publicity.” Personally, I don’t think many people would find that to be a true statement, but then again, there is something to be said for keeping your name in the news cycle. Speaking of which, IBM has had a busy week with a mix of good and bad stories to keep Big Blue in the public eye. Continuing to push its AI initiatives, IBM has named 40 women as leaders in the field (good), but at the other end of the spectrum is a plan for massive layoffs (bad). …
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IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Number 23

June 12, 2019 Doug Bidwell

Hello once again, good people of IBM i Land, and welcome to the 23rd edition of the IBM i PTF Guide for 2019. This time around, there is an update for the required PTF list to support SAP applications running on IBM i 7.3. There is also a new version of MGTools for IBM i 7.1, IBM i 7.2, and IBM i 7.3 – and we note that it has been quite a while since we have seen an update for IBM i 7.1 on this front.

New (Updated) Links this week:
- ASMI: Accessing the ASMI using a Web browser
… Read more
IBM i Roadmap Promises A Long Ride, Few Bumps

June 10, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

It would be hard to find a group of enterprise IT shops that are more conservative – meaning averse to risk – than the IBM midrange. Arguably, IBM System z mainframe shops are even more risk averse, but perhaps it is a matter more of scale than degree. In the average IBM i shop, one person – or maybe a handful of people – is keeping risk at bay, while in a mainframe shop there could be dozens or hundreds that are trying to steer the ship without rocking the boat.

Every now and then, Big Blue publishes an IBM …
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It’s Getting Cloud-i In Here

June 10, 2019 Alex Woodie

For many years, the only cloud option that IBM i customers had available to them were private clouds delivered by managed service providers (MSPs) or IBM business partners. But the IBM i community is now on the cusp of gaining not one but three public cloud options, delivered by Skytap, Google, and IBM itself – and more IBM i public clouds could be on the way.

It’s no secret that IBM has been seeking to place IBM i servers in the big three public clouds managed by Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud. And in …
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