Timothy Prickett Morgan
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IT Hiring And Salaries On The Rise For 2014
December 9, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIt is that time of the year again, when all of us look at how we did this year and wonder if we are going to better than this next year. For the IT departments in the United States, the outlook is a good one, according to the latest data coming out of Computer Economics.
The company has just completed its annual survey of 140 IT shops in the United States, and it looks like companies are expecting that inflation will go up a tiny bit in 2014. Inflation will be kept in check by the relatively high unemployment
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Reader Feedback On As I See It: Poisoning The Well
December 9, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreVictor:
Warning: Many generalities, and complaining, follow.
I agree that complaining is not always the best way to deal with a problem.
But if one thinks that there are situations that involve someone like the Pointy Haired Boss in Dilbert (and I do), and if you feel stuck in that situation for any number of reasons, then some complaining may be a way of seeking sympathy from others who have similar feelings.
Maybe the point of your article is that this is not a good thing, but sometimes “letting off steam” let’s you get back to work.
If you feel
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The Q3 Server Market And IBM’s Place In It
December 9, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe figures are out for server shipments and revenues for the third quarter from Gartner, and they shed a little more light on what is going on in the IBM customer base and in the market at large. A number of different factors are making it tough on Big Blue and these have short-term and long-term ramifications for IBM i shops and indeed any customers who are deploying Power-based systems.
The most important thing to realize is that while server shipments are continuing to grow, revenues are not and I suspect that profit margins have fallen even faster than
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IBM i Installed Base Dominated By Vintage Iron
December 9, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIf the IBM i-Power Systems platform was up for an award for longevity, it would actually have to be given two awards. One trophy would be for persevering as the last platform standing from the Minicomputer Revolution back in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s. And the second medal would be for machines that stay in the field for an incredibly, almost unbelievably, long time.
We all know this instinctively and anecdotally, having heard many of the legends of the AS/400 and its progeny out in the field. Stories of machines being sheet-rocked behind a wall or stacked over
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Admin Alert: Four Ways To Move An IBM i Partition, Part 1
December 4, 2013 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreI’m currently working with a client to migrate three IBM i partitions to new Power 7+ machines located in two data centers in different states. While there are several ways to approach migration, over the next two issues I’ll discuss four specific techniques for moving an IBM i partition to a new location and the different tasks you have to perform for each technique.
Four Ways To Move An IBM i
In general, there are four techniques for moving an IBM i partition to a different machine:
- Restore the partition in place or to a new location using the same
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Three Powerful SQL Words
December 4, 2013 Ted Holt
… Read moreLouisa May Alcott said, “I like good strong words that mean something.” So do I, especially when they’re good strong SQL words. It gives me great pleasure today to share three powerful SQL words with you. Consider the following summary query:
select d.ItemNumber, sum(d.Quantity) as Qty, sum(d.Quantity * d.Price) as Extended from InvoiceLines as d group by d.ItemNumber order by 1Here’s the result set:
ITEMNUMBER QTY EXTENDED A-1 8 88.00 A-3 7 35.00 A-7 7 52.00 B-1 26 51.25 Z-3 2 18.00
Standard stuff, yet very powerful. It beats writing an RPG program to read a file, check
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End-Of-Year Feedback
December 4, 2013 Hey, Esteemed IBM i Professional
… Read moreI hope 2013 was a good year for you. It was my best year in a while. I left a dysfunctional bureaucracy for a company where I can make a difference. I renewed several old acquaintances. And I found out from LinkedIn that I know someone who knows someone who knows Haynes Brooke, the guy who plays the sun in the Jimmy Dean sausage commercials. Let’s close out the year with some of the feedback you’ve been kind enough to send to me.
Hey, Ted:
In Alan’s Easy Method For Building A CSV File From A Report, you
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IBM Bops Around With Flex System Feature Prices
December 2, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreTrying to keep up with feature price changes is a big pain in the neck for both Power Systems resellers and customers buying machines. IBM has been making a bunch of changes here in there in the past few weeks that you need to be aware of as you shop.
In announcement letter 313-110 from November 12, IBM raised prices on selected Flex System features by between 3 and 16.5 percent. The price changes affect features for Flex System x240, x222, and x440 server nodes, which are all based on Intel Xeon processors. Here are the price changes by feature:
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IBM Tweaks European Power Systems Trade-In Deal
December 2, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreBack in February, IBM cooked up a trade-in rebate deal for Power Systems customers that gave them cash if they moved to a new machine and turned in an old one. That deal has been extended and tweaked several times as the year progressed–six times to be precise–after an update on November 21.
In announcement letter ENUSZA13-1003, IBM made it possible to upgrade some installed Power7-based systems to Power7+ machines as part of the deal. The deal was tweaked back in April so only Power7+ buyers could get the rebates, dropping Power7 machines from the list of eligible machines
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Reader Feedback Regarding The Shadow Of Database Hype
December 2, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreHey, Dan:
I must disagree with the quote that it was not until V7R1 that the AS/400 had “in-memory database.” We have been using the SETOBJACC command for many, many years to lock commonly used table files and work files into memory to improve performance.
The trick is to create a separate subsystem/memory pool that has no job queues to route actual jobs into the same memory paging space. It takes a surprisingly small amount of memory to achieve dramatic I/O savings on these files. For the work files, be sure to create them with deleted records, and set them