• Love – And Business – In The Time Of Coronavirus

  March 23, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We are shaped by bad times as much as good ones. Maybe more.

  Some of my earliest memories as an aware young person are of the effects of recession on my parents when they were young people working in the factories of New Jersey. And when I say young, I mean we were all young at the time. Both of my parents lost their jobs in the recession of 1960 through 1970, and they lost them again during the much worse recession from 1973 through 1975. It was scary for me and my siblings, but obviously even scarier …

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• Coronavirus Takes Its Toll On The Midrange

  March 23, 2020 Alex Woodie

  The IBM i midrange community has lived through a lot: hurricanes, fires, global recessions, and even terrorist attacks. And now it can add “viral pandemic” to the list of external events impacting the day-to-day operations of IBM i shops around the world, not to mention the cancellation of nearly all in-person meetings and conferences for the next two months.

  As the national reels from the spread of the novel coronavirus and the pneumonia-like disease that it causes, the IBM i midrange community has been forced to make substantial changes to its daily operations. For many office workers, that means forgoing …

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• Guru: Maximum Number Of Jobs And Job Table Warning Customization

  March 23, 2020 Dawn May

  The QMAXJOB system value specifies the maximum number of jobs that can exist on your IBM i partition. The default value is 163,520, with the valid range being 32,000 through 970,000. If you reach the maximum number of jobs as defined by this system value, very bad things can happen to your system. You can always sign on to the console as the system reserves one job table entry for the console, but if you hit the limit on the maximum number of jobs, you will not be able to start any new jobs. In the worst case, it will …

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• COVID-19 Response: Fresche Donates Presto Licenses, Uncaps User Fees For Access To IBM i Apps

  March 23, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Web application development tools have suddenly become much more important in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak, and Fresche Solutions, arguably the largest third-party software development tool provider in the IBM i market, wants to help companies with cope with remote workforces.

  Like other companies worldwide, Fresche has the majority of its employees working from home during the quarantines that are in effect to stop the spread of the coronavirus, and they are also capable of supporting customers whose end users, programmers, and system administrators are also working from home.

  But this is not enough, and Fresche knows this. To …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 22, Number 12

  March 23, 2020 Doug Bidwell

  It is a quiet in IBM i PTF Land this week, and that is to be expected with the coronavirus outbreak finally – and very regretfully but not unexpectedly – making its way around the global. But we will continue to put out the IBM i PTF Guide like clockwork because keeping mission critical systems up to date and humming along is more important than ever, even if the volume of business for most companies is, at this point with few exceptions, hard to guess.

  We are here to help, and if you run into trouble on your systems because …

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• Inside The ISV Revitalization Initiative For IBM i

  March 16, 2020 Alex Woodie

  The IBM i server’s strengths are well known: integration, ease of programming, ease of administration, security, resiliency, and a penchant for putting up with abuse. But aside from the platform’s attributes, another factor in IBM i’s favor is the community of independent software vendors (ISVs) who write business applications. To bolster this strength, IBM recently embarked upon an ISV revitalization initiative, and it wants IBM i ISVs to know all about it.

  In many ways, applications are the face of the platform. It was fairly common for companies to select a business application, such as MRP, ERP, supply chain execution, …

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• The Midrange Gets Pinched A Little More

  March 16, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The X86 server market turned in its best quarter ever in the final three months of 2019, will more machinery going out the door and more money coming in than has ever happened in the history of the systems market. Even if you adjusted sales in past quarters for inflation, it is still true. It was kind of crazy, even with some soft sales among OEM suppliers, the combination of ODM sales to hyperscalers and cloud builders. X86 server shipments rose by 12.9 percent to 3.35 million machines and revenues rose by 6.3 percent to $22.44 billion, according to the …

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• Guru: SQL Can Generate A Series

  March 16, 2020 Ted Holt

  Most of my work is run-of-the-mill, same-old-same-old, more-of-the-same. I’m not complaining. Most of life is mundane and routine, and that’s as it should be. Too much icing ruins the cake. But sometimes I get a challenge, and when that happens, programming can be fun.

  Today’s article comes out of such an experience. I needed a table with a week’s worth of dates in it. I could have written an RPG program, but I knew that SQL could handle the task. Today I’ll show you a couple of methods that you can use to generate a series of whole numbers and …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, March 16

  March 16, 2020 Jenny Thomas

  Social distancing isn’t a new concept for the staff of IT Jungle. We all work remote so we don’t get to spend time together in an office. (Don’t get me wrong. We like each other and wish we could see each other more often.) What is new for all of us is how to continue to operate as we shelter in place and wait to see what happens next. It might seem like our industry would be ideal for social distancing, but losing the opportunity to collaborate in the office or at a tradeshow or other event is sure to …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 22, Number 11

  March 16, 2020 Doug Bidwell

  It is hard to say what effect the coronavirus outbreak will have on the release of PTFs for the several IBM i releases in the field, and the regular pattern of updates that customers are used to. But so far, things are operating as normal, and there have been some updates. This being software and not requiring travel by any parties – and indeed, systems could be remotely patched by administrators working from home if need be.

  And here is the rundown by IBM i release:

  PTF Groups 7.4

  • SAP support required PTF list
  • MQ for IBM i – v9.0.0/v9.1.0

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• Analytics Moves To The Cloud, And IBM i Data Goes With It

  March 11, 2020 Alex Woodie

  The cloud is changing the face of IT, much to the chagrin of IBM i traditionalists who are accustomed to having full control over their applications and data. Change is always hard, but the good news is that, with a little discipline, the cloud presents a number of new and exciting analytical options for your important IBM i data.

  As a transaction processing powerhouse, the IBM i server is accustomed to hosting the most important data a business ever touches, including data about customers and their purchases. On-prem servers still run the lion’s share of online transactional processing (OLTP) workloads, …

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• GiAPA Tackles IBM i Performance Bottlenecks

  March 11, 2020 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that are frustrated with persistent performance problems may want to check out an innovative tool called GiAPA. Developed by the Danish firm iPerformance ApS, the tool has alleviated bottlenecks and saved millions of dollars for some of the biggest IBM i shops in the world. Kaare Plesner, the tool’s creator, recently shared his story with IT Jungle.

  In the early 1980s, Plesner returned to Denmark after spending a year abroad working as a mainframe systems programmer. The System/38 was quickly being adopted, but Plesner noticed that it didn’t have the same level of operational tooling that …

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• What’s New with RDi Version 9.6.0.7

  March 11, 2020 Alex Woodie

  IBM last month unveiled Rational Developer for i (RDi) version 9.6.0.7, the first release of the popular IBM i development environment in about a year. With this release, IBM is giving developers a handful of new capabilities, including the ability to create procedures out of pieces of code, as well as the ability to test incoming parameters.

  RDi is IBM’s flagship integrated development environment (IDE) for the IBM i platform. The product isn’t universally used across the IBM i community, and it’s not free. But many IBM i professionals swear by the graphical and modern IDE, particularly compared to older …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, March 11

  March 11, 2020 Jenny Thomas

  As if you need another reminder of the ubiquitous COVID-19, even our IBM i ecosystem is not immune to the march of this illness. Big Blue has been taking steps to protect employees and prevent the spread, and it’s been lending some computing power to the search for treatments or maybe even a vaccine. At IT Jungle, we already work remotely so we are isolated from a workplace environment, although all of us have school-age children so we aren’t exactly comfortably wrapped in a protective bubble. There are still many safe activities that you can do without fear of the …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 22, Number 10

  March 11, 2020 Doug Bidwell

  Hello fellow IBM i-ers, and a good PTF patching day to you. The new thing that hit this week is an updated microcode for Machine-Type Models: 5148-21L; 5148-22L; 8247-21L; 8247-22L; 8247-42L; 8284-21A; 8284-22A; 8286-41A; 8286-42A; 8408-44E; and 8408-E8E. This includes System Firmware Level: SV860_215, which fixes a known HIPER issue. See this link for details.

  And here is the rundown by IBM i release:

  PTF Groups 7.4

  • Temporary Storage PTFs

  PTF Groups 7.3

  • Temporary Storage PTFs

  PTF Groups 7.2

  • Nothing here, nothing at all

  PTF Groups 7.1

  • Nothing here to see here, either

  New (or Updated) Links this week: …

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• How GraphQL Can Improve IBM i APIs

  March 9, 2020 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops are embracing APIs as a method for accessing data and programs, just like the wider IT world. As RESTful Web services overtook SOAP-based ones in popularity, IBM i shops moved with them. Now a new approach to Web services, dubbed GraphQL, is gaining traction in the wider IT world, and leading IBM i developers are right there again.

  GraphQL, if you’re not familiar, is a relatively new language and runtime for exposing and consuming APIs. The software, which was originally developed in 2015 by Facebook to streamline delivery of content in complex environments, essentially provides an abstraction …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Giving IBM i Developers A Helping Hand

  March 9, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  (Sponsored Content) The good thing about the Moore’s Law improvements in compute, storage, and networking capacity is that the cost of a complete IT system more accurately reflects where the real value of that system was always really derived.

  In decades gone by, the AS/400 hardware cost represented somewhere on the order of 85 percent of the cost of a server and its storage and the OS/400 systems software accounted for the remaining 15 percent or so. Over time, the hardware costs have dropped to about a third of the overall system cost as systems have also gotten …

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• Guru: In Pursuit Of Reasonable Data

  March 9, 2020 Ted Holt

  My awareness of the indifference of computers toward the reasonableness of data dawned when I enrolled in the university. The band director told me to sign up for band and jazz band for zero semester hours. He said the stupid computer wouldn’t know that no one takes a course for zero hours, wouldn’t flag me to obtain permission from the dean to carry an overload, yet would grant me the credit. He was right.

  Love ‘em or hate ‘em, we live with them, we learn to get around them when they limit us, and we deal with them when they …

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• As I See It: In the Shadow of The West Wing

  March 9, 2020 Victor Rozek

  Twenty years ago, I developed an addiction. Not to one of the usual recreational substances, but to Aaron Sorkin’s writing. The West Wing was like no other show I had ever seen. It had gravitas. It explored issues of significance. The dialogue was crisp and quick. The characters had range, from funny and wise, to playful and profound. For the first time since I began watching television, I didn’t want to miss a single word.

  It aired at a difficult time for the country. The Bush administration was in the process of orchestrating two major wars, the housing bubble, and …

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• Big Blue Cuts Deals On Entry Power Systems Iron

  March 9, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With no new Power processors on the immediate horizon, except a kicker Power9’ that is aimed at supercomputer systems providing a testbed for future high bandwidth main memory technology that will debut with the Power10 chips in 2021, IBM has to do something to try to move some iron. Price cuts are always a good incentive.

  And so, we see in announcement letter ZAEP0091B, which was quietly updated on March 5, when it came to our attention, after being announced on January 24, when we did not see in the IBM online announcement feed (because it wasn’t there, not …

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