Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Putting Your i System in Semi-Restricted State
November 16, 2011 Hey, Joe
… Read moreWe need to put one of our i partitions in restricted state where no applications are running. However, we also need TCP/IP to be up while the system is down, so that we can download PTFs and some software upgrades while our third-party packages aren’t in use. Is there a way to put our system in a semi-restricted state where we can only use our system console and TCP/IP communications?
–Mike
Yes, there is. And it’s relatively easy to accomplish. Here’s the drill.
First, make sure all your users are off the system. Then, make sure that all your batch
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Wow! I Could Have Had Long Column Names!
November 16, 2011 Ted Holt
… Read moreSometimes I find out that something useful has been available to me for a long time, but I didn’t know about it. Then I feel like a moron. Today I’m telling you that a certain DB2 for i feature has been around for decades, and you’re probably not using it. However, there’s no need to feel like a moron.
The feature of which I speak is the database ALIAS. As you well know, DB2 for i, in its native architecture, permits database column (field) names of up to 10 characters. That’s certainly better than the six-character limit for identifiers in
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NULL and NOT IN
November 16, 2011 Ted Holt
… Read moreNo matter who you are, there’s always something you can learn. In Much Ado about Nothing: Interesting Facts about Null, I presented a good bit of information about null values in database tables. Imagine my surprise and delight to stumble upon something I did not know about nulls.
It started innocently enough. I was surfing the Web and happened upon a link to an article entitled Ten Common SQL Programming Mistakes. I couldn’t click the link fast enough.
I found a very well-written article by Plamen Ratchev. I won’t repeat the whole thing here, but Ratchev wrote about
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John Opel, Former IBM CEO, 1925-2011
November 14, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreJohn Opel didn’t want to run a hardware store after college and the great irony (pun intended) is that he ended up running IBM, the largest data processing hardware company in the world at the peak of its mainframe and midrange prowess.
Opel, who was 86, died on November 3. He was IBM’s fifth CEO and without a doubt one of its better ones. Ginni Rometty, who will be IBM’s ninth CEO when she takes over on January 1, has several sets of big shoes to fill. (Well, the assumption is that Lou Gerstner’s were not that big physically,
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Profits Grow Faster Than Sales At Jack Henry In Fiscal Q1
November 14, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreJack Henry & Associates, a software and services provider for the financial sector that has a decently sized IBM i business, has turned in another good quarter of sales.
In the quarter ended in September, which was Jack Henry’s first quarter of fiscal 2012, hardware sales, which includes Power Systems running IBM i as well as other platforms, rose by 7 percent to $15.8 million. Software license sales skyrocketed 30 percent to $12.3 million, and support and services revenues were up a more modest 5 percent but weighed in at $220.3 million. (Within the support and services segment, Jack
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Reader Feedback On Fun With IBM i Software Pricing
November 14, 2011 Hey, TPM
… Read moreYou said: “So, if you have an entry Power 710 or 720 machine, you are paying $7.29 per day to use IBM i 7.1.”
I’m based in the United Kingdom, so the numbers are different over here, but how does that stack up compared to the utilities cost per employee, I wonder? And maybe the phone bill? And the cost of IT support staffing to keep everyone up and running? I’m sure I heard that the corporate rate for IT support was horrendous for Windows and it’s not like you can access an IBM i without using Windows these days,
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The Dreamy And Flashy Power 720 P05 Machine
November 14, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIt takes a whole village of smart people to raise a market because no single human being can calculate all of the angles. That’s why there are laws against selective disclosure in the financial services market, and it is also one of the reasons why newsletters such as this one not only persist in the Internet Era, but have much broader impact than magazines used to in days of old. (But online publishing is, alas, a much more difficult and less profitable business than the magazine salad days of the 1980s and early 1990s.) In any event, it takes smart
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A Radical Idea For IBM i Software Pricing
November 14, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreLately, I have been thinking a lot about IBM‘s pricing for the IBM i operating system and database. With Big Blue having long since converged its Software Group and its Systems and Technology Group, you would think that the heat would be off in some ways to upgrade hardware and for the company to focus on getting customers current on software. But IBM likes to sell new systems as well as operating systems to customers, and it needs to make money as much as midrange shops don’t like to spend it.
I decided to take a look at OS/400,
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Admin Alert: When You Can’t Answer Record Lock Errors
November 9, 2011 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreRecently, a client had a problem with Power i record allocation messages. When a program crashed with an RPG1218 record lock inquiry message, the system didn’t ask for a message reply. Instead, it automatically answered the message with a “D” to dump program data and end the job. The client didn’t want this to happen. He’d rather answer the message himself and retry the allocation. Here’s what happened and how it applies to all i OS shops.
A Common Problem
The first thing to understand is that this is a fairly common i OS situation. It isn’t magic or a
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Meet JSON
November 9, 2011 Alex Roytman
… Read moreIf you have done Web application development with any modern toolset or technology lately, you have undoubtedly run across a trusty friend of mine: JSON (pronounced Jason). In recent years, JSON, or JavaScript Object Notation, has become the data interchange format of choice for Web applications. It has allowed many Web frameworks to flourish and has tremendously simplified my own job of creating IBM i web applications and frameworks. That’s why I decided to write a series of articles on JSON, in which I will explain the what, the why, and the how of JSON in detail.
Let’s get going!