Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Maxava Puts Up Another $50,000 For iFoundation Grants
July 7, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreHigh availability software vendor Maxava has generously opened up its checkbook and for the fourth year in a row has committed funds for the Maxava iFoundation to help support efforts to bolster the IBM i community.
The iFoundation was set up by the New Zealand company, which now has a presence around the globe, four years ago because the company’s managers wanted to actually do something to promote the community. Specifically, iFoundation makes grants to not-for-profit organizations promote the IBM i platform and support activities that are involved with the exchanging of knowledge, skills, or ideas about the IBM i
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Still A Community Of Common Interest
July 7, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWhenever we come upon the anniversary of the launch of the AS/400, which passed on a week when The Four Hundred was off on hiatus, most of us are inclined to contemplate and celebrate the genius of the system and the adventurous techies inside of IBM who took a lot of cool ideas about how a system should be designed and created a platform that made it possible for midrange businesses to do sophisticated things without having a lot of propellerheads on their staff to make it all work. This is a very top-down view of the AS/400 and its
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Admin Alert: Reorganizing IBM i Files To Improve Disk Performance, Part 2
June 25, 2014 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreLast issue, I began putting together a template for detecting and efficiently reorganizing physical files on IBM i partitions. I covered the most common reasons administrators reorganize files and demonstrated a procedure for detecting which files on your system need reorganization. This week, I’ll complete the process by reviewing different ways to reorganize files and look at some techniques for file reorganization while the file is active.
Steps To Effectively Reorganizing Files
As I discussed last time, here are the steps to follow for an effective disk reorganization strategy.
- Set up a procedure for identifying files and members that need
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Here’s More Help For A Huge Hardship
June 25, 2014 Ted Holt
… Read moreIn the April 16, 2014, issue of this august publication, I shared how encoded vector indexes can help with the task of summarizing data from large tables. Tom McKinley of IBM graciously emailed me with more information about that technique, and it is my pleasure to pass Tom’s wisdom along to you.
Assume two tables–one of items, one of sales.
create table Items ( Item char (12) not null, Description char (25), Cost dec (7,2), Price dec (7,2), primary key (Item)) create table Sales ( ID integer as identity, Invoice dec (9,0), Line dec (3,0), InvoiceDate date, Customer dec (7,0), -
Sundry I/O Enhancements For Power8 Servers
June 16, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIn addition to the new four-core Power8 system aimed at IBM i customers that came out last week, IBM made a bunch of I/O and storage announcements relating to the new machines.
In announcement letter 114-094, which came out on June 10, IBM said that it was making its existing two-port communications adapter (that is feature 2893 and 2894) orderable for machines running IBM i. These replace the two-port asynchronous communications adapters (features 5289 and 5290) that were announced with the new machines back in April. Those cards are now not going to be supported.
IBM does not yet
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Disk Array Sales Cool Off In The First Quarter
June 16, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreHere is something that a lot of people probably didn’t expect: Disk array sales took a dive in the first quarter of the year, particularly at the high end of the market.
According to the latest market research from IDC, the world consumed a total of 9.9 exabytes of capacity on the combination of internal and external disk arrays from January through March, representing a mere 19.9 percent increase in capacity on a year-over-year basis. In the fourth quarter, as we previously reported, total disk array capacity shipped was up 26.2 percent to 10.2 exabytes, reversing several quarters
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Power8 Systems Added To Long-Running Trade-In Deal
June 16, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWe are getting ready to close out the second quarter, and IBM is in a mood to do a little wheeling and dealing to help move its stockpiles of Power7+ systems as well as the shiny new Power8 “scale-out” systems that came out back in April.
In announcement letter 314-067, IBM has outlined the trade-ins for the new Power8 systems that are available under a deal that was last updated last September and that seems to have been running on again and off again for longer than I can remember. The deal is available to customers who replace vintage
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Four-Core Power8 Box For Entry IBM i Shops Ships Early
June 16, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe hardware resellers, software peddlers, and IBM i shops that have modest processing needs and generally modest system budgets have all been waiting for it. And IBM did not say a word about it when the initial Power8 systems were launched back in April. But, all of us in the IBM i community knew, without a doubt, that Big Blue would have to put out a four-core machine with an IBM i P05 software tier.
The reason is simple: More than 95 percent of the IBM i installed base has workloads that can easily fit into an entry P05 system,
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Admin Alert: Reorganizing IBM i Files To Improve Disk Performance, Part 1
June 11, 2014 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreOne of the easiest ways to improve IBM i performance is to make sure all your critical files are reorganized on a regular basis. Files with excessive deleted records take longer to read because each returned record block contains deleted as well as active records. The next two columns, I’ll present a template for detecting and reorganizing your most active files to improve disk processing efficiency.
Why We Reorg
There are several good reasons for reorganizing files with large numbers of deleted records, including:
1. Conserving disk space–If your disk is filling up, you can retrieve a fair amount
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Surmounting Identity Column Challenges
June 11, 2014 Ted Holt
… Read moreUsing an identity column is a wonderful way to ensure that each row of a table (record of a physical file) has a unique identifier. It sure beats storing the next batch (invoice, transaction, etc.) number in a data area or a one-record database file. Here are a few things to keep in mind when inserting rows (writing records) into a table that has an identity column.
1. Let the system assign the value to the identity column. You do this by specifying GENERATED ALWAYS or omitting the GENERATED option when you create the table.
create table Sales ( ID