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.

• Cost, Simplicity Driving Cloud HA Adoption

  October 9, 2017 Alex Woodie

  In years past, the IBM i community has adopted high availability software at a slow but steady pace. But the cloud portion of this market is growing at a much faster rate, thanks to the lower costs and simpler setups that cloud-based high availability brings to customers.

  Penetration of high availability software into the IBM i market is likely to hit 50 percent this year for the first time ever. That forecast can reasonably be made by looking at HelpSystems‘ 2017 IBM i Marketplace Survey, which showed a 2 percent jump in HA usage from 2015 to 2016, …

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• IBM Adds Support For Publishing JSON In DB2

  October 4, 2017 Alex Woodie

  At long last, IBM i shops will be able to publish JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) documents from their Db2 for i database. That much-desired capability will finally arrive as part of the latest Technology Refreshes (TRs) for IBM i versions 7.2 and 7.3, which were announced yesterday and ship this month. New SQL commands and security log enhancements round out the release.

  The capability to publish JSON documents has been a long time coming for IBM i shops, who until now have had to content themselves with the capability to consume and store JSON within their database, but who lacked …

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• IBM Patches 28 More Security Vulns In JDK

  October 4, 2017 Alex Woodie

  IBM on Saturday released patches to fix 28 flaws in the Java Development Kit (JDK) that ships with the IBM i operating system. Almost all of the flaws originated in Oracle’s underlying Java Standard Edition (SE) kit, and many of them are considered very severe.

  Twenty-seven of the 28 flaws impact the IBM SDK Java Technology Edition software in all releases of IBM i, from version 6.1 to version 7.3, according to the September 28 security bulletin. The patches released by IBM fix the problems in all of these releases. While i5/OS V5R4 is likely impacted too, IBM will …

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• Why Encryption Is Not A Silver Bullet

  October 2, 2017 Alex Woodie

  While there is a temptation to view database encryption as the ultimate form of security, there are a variety reasons why the technology should not be relied upon as the main means to protect your valuable DB24i data. We talk with former IBMer Bruce Bading, who wrote the book on IBM i security assessments, to get the dirty details.

  In the wake of the Equifax hack, several important questions have gone unanswered: Did the credit giant encrypt its data, and if so, how did hackers end up with 143 million records? With multiple government investigations – and many more civil …

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• One IBM i Route Into the API Economy

  September 27, 2017 Alex Woodie

  The so-called API Economy is emerging as a legitimate engine for driving the growth of commerce around the world. But with mostly monolithic apps written years ago, the IBM i installed base isn’t well positioned to be a major player. However, there are alternative pathways into the API Economy for IBM i shops, if they know where to look.

  The API Economy refers to the idea that, by exposing bits and pieces of our internal systems out to the world through well-defined application programming interfaces (APIs) – which usually manifest REST-based Web services, although SOAP and XML files will work …

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• A Fast Idle For IBM i Development

  September 27, 2017 Alex Woodie

  One thing that’s clear about Liam Allan is he doesn’t take things slow. At just 20 years of age, Allan is one of the brightest young developers on the platform. Now the British coder is sharing his latest creation with the IBM i world: a lightweight ILE development tool dubbed Idle.

  There are many options when it comes to IBM i development tools, especially if open source, Web-native languages are your thing. There’s no shortage of environments for creating PHP, Node.js or Java apps. The opening of the IBM i platform has been a great thing in that regard.

  But …

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• Evaluating Your IBM i Encryption Options

  September 25, 2017 Alex Woodie

  In the wake of the Equifax breach, companies are taking a hard look at their security practices, including the use of encryption that renders data unreadable. While database encryption is not a panacea for securing a Db2 for i database – especially if there are other vulnerabilities in an IBM i system – it can play an important role in protecting sensitive data from leaking out into the world.

  Encryption has emerged as a topic in the wake of the massive data breach at Equifax, which lost critical data like names, addresses, and Social Security numbers for 143 million Americans, …

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• Cloud Provides A Third HA Option

  September 20, 2017 Alex Woodie

  In the third part of our series on IBM i high availability options, we’re looking up — to the cloud, that is.

  If you’re in the market to implement an IBM i high availability solution – and the best data we’ve seen indicates that many IBM i shops are shopping in 2017 – then you basically have three options to choose from: logical replication software solutions, IBM’s Power HA hardware solution, and a cloud-based HA solution.

  We covered the first two offerings in previous stories (you can find our story on logical replication here and our story on PowerHA here …

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• Following Equifax, Focus On Database Encryption

  September 20, 2017 Alex Woodie

  In the wake of the massive data breach at Equifax that has impacted millions of Americans, suspicions are arising that the company did not even encrypt its data. As hard as it is to believe that one of the big three credit agencies neglected to use encryption, a survey suggests that storing data in plaintext is a common business practice at the vast majority of IBM i shops.

  Despite all the news coverage of this major data breach, critical facts and details are scarce. It’s hard to know exactly what steps Equifax’s IT department took to protect its data, for …

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• Three Lessons IBM i Shops Can Learn From The Equifax Hack

  September 18, 2017 Alex Woodie

  The recent Equifax data breach exposed extremely sensitive data of 143 million consumers, putting more than half of Americans at risk. While an IBM i server was likely not involved here, Equifax’s actions – and more importantly, its inactions – can teach IBM i shops something about data security.

  Just when you thought the string of major data breaches couldn’t get any worse, Equifax happened. The number of people impacted by the hack is relatively small, as these things go. When you consider that Yahoo’s 2014 breach exposed the data of 1.5 billion people, and that Adult Friend Finder’s 2016 …

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