Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Index Advisor, Part 2
April 11, 2012 Paul Tuohy
… Read moreIn part 1 of this series, I introduced you to the basic functionality of Index Advisor. In this article, we will take a look at more of the options and functionality available with Index Advisor for Systems Director Navigator for i.
More Options
Apart from the obvious information (table and schema names), the Index Advisor window also gives us some pertinent information, such as:
- The advised key
- The first and last time the index was advised
- The number of times the index was advised
- The longest and average execution times for the queries that generated the index advise
- The
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IBM Codes History Of Modern Math iPad App
April 9, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreOn April 7, 1964, two weeks before the World’s Fair opened up in Flushing, Queens, one and a half borough hops from where I sit as I write The Four Hundred each week, IBM announced a machine that still, to a large degree, defines what a system is. It was the System/360 mainframe, of course, and we sometimes forget how exotic computers were at the time, and indeed mathematics and information theory as well.
By the way, the 1965 Ford Mustang–the only car I ever really want to own, if I ever do own a car again, and make mine
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Job Growth Stalls In March, IT A Mixed Bag
April 9, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIs the economy doing better or worse? Is the monthly jobs report that comes out of the Bureau of Labor Statistics any kind of real indicator, or is it massaged so much with seasonal adjustments and other stat tricks that it is more like an impressionist painting of the economy than a picture?
I don’t know, but I sometimes have my doubts about what is going on with the unemployment rate and job counts that the Department of Labor puts out after it surveys 160,000 businesses and 60,000 homes each month to find out who is employing and who is
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Reader Feedback On IBM i Versus Oracle JDE, Smart IBM i Shops Get Connected
April 9, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreJust wanted to note that for current IBM i customers like me, the Power 750 comparison doesn’t ring true. I have JDE World (yes, World) running on two IBM i machines, a System i 550 and a Power 720.
We’re looking at new ERP systems for one of the companies right now but I doubt whether I can use any of this info because our upgrade path for the System i 550 box is a Power 720 with four to eight processors, not a Power 750. We’re currently running the company comfortably on four Power6+ processors so we wouldn’t even
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Dell Goes After IBM Mainframe And Midrange Apps
April 9, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe road is littered with the smoking hulks of the upstart system companies and smaller software firms that have tried to attack the IBM proprietary midrange and mainframe platforms over the past four decades. And based on two key acquisitions last week, it looks like PC and server maker Dell is gearing up to take a more direct run at the System z mainframe and its baby brother, the Power Systems-IBM i platform.
Yeah, that ought to prick up more than a few ears in the IBM i market, and perhaps get more than a few vendors of application modernization
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Some Thoughts About IBM’s Next Generation Platform
April 9, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe software people at IBM are now firmly in charge of systems development at the company and are apparently trying to bring iterative software development techniques to hardware. The idea, in short, is to make hardware more modular as well as the systems software stacks that run upon that hardware so IBM can integrate new functionality into systems in an iterative fashion, perhaps several times a year, rather than a big bang system change every two or three years. This is not the dumbest thing I have ever heard.
By picking up the pace, IBM could accomplish a number
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Admin Alert: Readers Check in on Four Simple Rules for PTFs
April 4, 2012 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreAfter posting my March 21st article on Four Simple Rules for PTF Management, I received so much good information from our readers on PTFs that I decided to pass it along in this follow-up column. Here’s some additional tips and techniques on PTF management that might make it easier to apply PTF fixes on your IBM i machines.
Q: When does IBM refresh a Cume PTF package? A: Never
Reader Richard Shearwood wrote in with this piece of information about whether IBM corrects cumulative PTF packages containing bad PTFs after the package is released.
IBM never refreshed a cume
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Index Advisor, Part 1
April 4, 2012 Paul Tuohy
… Read moreThe use of SQL within our applications is on the increase. After a shaky start in the early days of the AS/400, SQL has gone from strength to strength with every release of the operating system.
The use of embedded SQL (in RPG) stabilized with V5R1 and really came into its own when free-form SQL was introduced in V5R4 and PTFed back to V5R3.
But with SQL, and embedded SQL especially, there is always that lingering doubt about SQL performance when accessing data. We have all heard horror stories about the lights in the building dimming when a certain program
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New Power Systems Redbooks, And A Call For Residency Volunteers
April 2, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIf you are looking for the latest technical dope on the Power7-based Power Systems servers, then you will be happy to know that IBM has just updated its Redbook and Redpaper technical library to include new technologies announced last fall.
Here’s a list of the latest Power Systems Redpapers, which came out on March 22:
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Cloudy SaaS Apps To Puff Up To $14.5 Billion
April 2, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWhile there is a lot of talk about companies moving their applications to the cloud, the actual money that is being spent on clouds is more for software-as-a-service, or SaaS, applications that a company or its hosting partner runs in a cloud on behalf of customers.
According to the market watchers at Gartner, companies spent $12.3 billion on SaaS software in 2011, and this slice of the software racket is expected to rise by 17.9 percent to $14.5 billion this year and continue growing at enough of a clip to reach $22.1 billion by 2015.
“After more than a