Alex Woodie

Alex Woodie is Senior Editor at IT Jungle. He was previously editor of two of IT Jungle's main newsletters, Four Hundred Stuff and The Windows Observer. Prior to joining Midrange Server (as Guild Companies was formerly called) in October 2001, Alex was a products editor at now defunct publisher Midrange Computing, where he was first introduced to the AS/400 and covered hardware, software, and services for Midrange Technology SHOWCASE magazine. Before joining Midrange Computing, Alex was a staff writer for The Insurance Journal and a reporter and columnist with The Paradise Post newspaper. Woodie obtained his Bachelors of Arts degree in journalism from Humboldt State University in 1997. Upon graduation, Alex intended to make his way onto a major daily newspaper, but in 1999 he found himself drawn to the high-technology industry, where his background in science and engineering has suited him well. He lives in Northern San Diego County. When he is not writing next week's newsletters, Alex can be found in his favorite chair reading the day's paper, in the kitchen, or at the beach.

• IBM Bolsters HyperSwap to Protect IBM i Against Downtime

  May 2, 2016 Alex Woodie

  A new release of the HyperSwap feature in IBM‘s PowerHA Enterprise Edition will give IBM i shops better protection against IBM i downtime–in particular during planned downtime events, like operating system upgrades. IBM also released a statement of direction to bring more disaster recovery (DR) capabilities to HyperSwap, including support for a remotely located third copy of IBM i data. HyperSwap is a data resiliency feature introduced two years ago with the launch of IBM i version 7.2. The mainframe-class technology relies on the peer-to-peer remote copy (PPRC) synchronous data replication protocol (i.e. Metro Mirror) to replicate DB2 for

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• Software Vendors Prep For IBM i 7.3, Applaud PDP for Testing

  April 25, 2016 Alex Woodie

  It’s been only 10 days since IBM i 7.3 became generally available, and customers are just starting to play around with it. While we don’t expect many 7.3 environments to go into production right away, a surprising number of software vendors already support it. And you might be interested in learning about the innovative new way that IBM is helping vendors get current on new releases, namely the Power Development Cloud (PDP). There’s a lot of good stuff in IBM i 7.3, which IBM announced on April 12 and shipped three days later. In addition to the neat new analytic

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• DB2 Web Query For i Now Supports External Databases

  April 18, 2016 Alex Woodie

  New OLAP and temporal data capabilities in DB2 headlined the launch of IBM i 7.3. But those weren’t the only analytic functions delivered last week by IBM. Tucked inside the announcements was a new release of DB2 Web Query for i that will make it easier to bring data from outside databases into an IBM i-based data warehouse. IBM is including new data adapters with DB2 Web Query for i Standard Edition version 2.2 that support PostgreSQL, MariaDB, and MySQL. The new release also includes support for generic Type 4 JDBC drivers, which will make it easier to get

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• Inside the New Analytic Functions of IBM i 7.3

  April 13, 2016 Alex Woodie

  If you’ve been waiting for new analytic functions to come to IBM i, your wait is about over. The new release of the IBM i OS that will ship Friday brings several new analytic features to the DB2 for i database–including the capability to do time-based queries and several new OLAP functions–that customers have been asking IBM to add for several years. Temporal Queries The new temporal features in DB2 for i will allow users to perform time-based queries, which could be used for business intelligence reasons, as well as for security and auditing reasons. Mark Anderson, the chief architect

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• Why WebSocket Apps Are In Your IBM i Future

  April 13, 2016 Alex Woodie

  Do you pine for the simpler days of the AS/400, when RPG was king and data was served through super-efficient 5250 interfaces? If so, you’re not alone–the relentless crush of modern technologies takes a toll on all of us. But while the world isn’t likely to go back to RPG and 5250, you might find something that works in a similar way in a new technology called WebSockets. KrengelTech‘s Aaron Bartell had a great description of WebSocket during a recent BCD webinar on Node.JS and other open source technologies for IBM i. “It’s basically full duplex communication from client

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• How InterForm Simplifies XML Document Handling for IBM i

  April 13, 2016 Alex Woodie

  At the turn of the century, extensible markup language (XML) promised to simplify many data interchange tasks for IT professionals. Sixteen years later, XML is firmly part of the technological menagerie in the United States, but nowhere near a universal standard. However, over in Europe, XML is a much bigger deal, which is why InterForm added significant new XML capabilities in the latest release of its IBM i-based forms package. Supporting XML isn’t just a good idea for companies who deal with clients in Europe. In many cases, it’s the law, says InterForm CEO Peter Sørensen. “In Europe almost every

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• Spreading A Wider IT Net At UCG Technologies

  April 12, 2016 Alex Woodie

  Selling boxes in the midrange isn’t easy. A shrinking customer base, falling margins on hardware sales, and tight IT budgets combine to put the squeeze on even the best-run reseller outfits. For longtime IBM business partner Jim Kandrac, the shift was palpable enough to lead him to rename his Cleveland, Ohio-based company from United Computer Group to UCG Technologies. It’s notable that “computer” is no longer in the name of Kandrac’s company. Are computers no longer important to the business? “The word computer is becoming more passé,” he says. “They’re still important, but they’re less important.” In the heyday

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• MariaDB Dropping In On IBM i To Replace MySQL

  April 4, 2016 Alex Woodie

  When Oracle dropped support for IBM i with its MySQL database five years ago, it effectively slammed the door shut on a promising path to rejuvenate the IBM i ecosystem with an open source of applications. But soon that door will re-open via MariaDB, a fork of MySQL that is a drop-in replacement for Oracle’s open database. Zend‘s PHP-on-IBM i guru Mike Pavlak gives IT Jungle the scoop on what’s about to happen. According to Pavlak, work is under way to get MariaDB running on IBM i, which it will do in the same manner that MySQL came

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• A Peek At Upcoming Open Source Enhancements In IBM i

  March 28, 2016 Alex Woodie

  Over the past 15 years, the open source community has driven a massive amount of innovation in IT. It has gotten to the point where IBM and Microsoft–two bastions of proprietary development–are now champions of open source. The open source wave is not quite as strong on the IBM i platform, but it appears that wave will gain momentum with the upcoming new release of the OS. It’s hard to quantify the value created through open source development of software. Last year, the Linux Foundation released a white paper that found the total value of the development of the

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• Verizon Outlines Disturbing AS/400 Breach At Water District

  March 16, 2016 Alex Woodie

  Cyber intruders who gained access to an AS/400 at a water district were able to manipulate the flow of chemicals into the public water supply, Verizon says in its latest Data Breach Digest. While customers served by the water district were not harmed, the episode shows the potential consequences of failure to properly secure critical systems in an increasingly connected world. Verizon dedicated five pages to laying out the disturbing breach of a water district that it referred to as Kemuri Water Company (KWC), which is not a real name. The water district had first contacted Verizon’s RISK Team to

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