Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Adobe Flash Builder for the iSeries Programmer, Part 1
August 10, 2011 Shannon O'Donnell
… Read moreNote: The code accompanying this article is available for download here.
If I’ve heard it once, I’ve heard it a thousand times: “The AS/400 is a legacy system with character-based data that is good for nothing but running batch programs.” That sentiment drives me right up the wall. In all fairness, however, the traditional iSeries/RPG programmer has done very little to prove these nay-sayers wrong. Sure, every once in a while you will see an RPG programmer throw some nice colors on a display file or maybe even use a message subfile, but while those were pretty cool tricks
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IBM Tweaks Rational Developer Prices, Adds New Power Systems UPS
August 8, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIBM has not done a lot of product announcements during the summer weeks relating to the Power Systems product family, but it usually sneaks out a thing or two when we are all trying to take vacation.
In announcement letter 311-103, IBM cut the price tag a bit on Rational Developer for i for SOA Construction V8.0. Specifically, it cut the price on feature 0003 of product number 5733-SOC by 16.5 percent, to $1,110. This is the per-user fee for this application development tool when bought with a Power Systems server and including one year of Software Maintenance bundled
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COMMON Europe Updates Top Concerns i Budget Data
August 8, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIn my analysis of the preliminary Top Concerns data coming out of a survey done by COMMON Europe, I noted that on the budgetary data, the European IBM i user group had mixed customer, business partner, and IBM survey response data together when what it should have done is just look at the customer data. They are the ones cutting the checks on Power Systems iron, after all.
As it turns out, taking out the IBM and business partner data did not change the budgetary picture all that much, which is a coincidence of unusual proportions. Take a look:
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The IT Sector Creates Jobs In July, Boosting A Jittery and Jumpy Economy
August 8, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIf you have a job, no matter how much it might annoy you, it is a good thing. Having two, like I have to so the ends will meet somewhere not near the poorhouse (as if the world had those any more) is probably a better idea, if you have the energy or time. There are still 13.9 million unemployed people in the United States, according to the latest report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and it doesn’t look like either they or those who dropped out of the statistics because they have stopped looking for work will find
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Lean Mean Green Screens
August 8, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreHow many green screens are still out there in the world? Too many is the obvious smart-aleck answer to that question, and more than you would expect is probably closer to the real answer. I cut my teeth on Z80-based machines and then an Apple IIe and a handful of different machines with character-based interfaces long before I ever saw a Macintosh or a Unix workstation in college. After all these years, an IBM 3270 or 5250 green screen, or even a DEC VT terminal, are not shocking to me. They remind me of my youth and while I wouldn’t
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Admin Alert: A Starter Program to Find Damaged Objects in i OS 6.1.1
July 27, 2011 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreAfter a damaged object prevented a full system production backup in my shop, I was asked to devise a technique for detecting damaged objects on the system. This week, I’m presenting my starter CL program that looks for damaged objects as a template for approaching the issue, in the hopes that others can add to and expand on this code.
How Objects Get Damaged
iSeries, System i, and Power i objects can get damaged in a variety of ways, including:
- Electrical outages where the power is quickly cut off before the hard drive has a chance to finish writing all
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Solving iSeries Access Data Transfer Problems and Detecting Disk Damage
July 27, 2011 Hey, Joe
… Read moreI’m having a problem downloading a file using iSeries Access Data Transfer from System i. Whenever I perform my download, I get the CWBDB0099 and SQL0420 errors shown below. I can click OK and still download the file, but I’d like to get rid of this error. What’s going on and how do I fix it?
–Laura
Here’s the error message that Laura is referring to and what I did to solve it.
After researching, I couldn’t find any references to the CWBDB0099 error with the SQL4020 sub-error. There were plenty of references to the CWBDB0099 error with sub-error SQL0181,
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REPLACE to Replace Characters in a String
July 27, 2011 Skip Marchesani
… Read moreIn V5R3, IBM simplified the manipulation of character strings with the implementation of the INSERT and REPLACE functions in SQL. INSERT allows the positional insertion of one or more characters in a string and REPLACE scans for all occurrences of a target string and overlays or replaces the target string with a replace string. INSERT was discussed in my previous article, and now I will discuss REPLACE.
Prior to the implementation of REPLACE in V5R3, scanning for the existence of a target string and replacing it with another string was not very easy. A positional replacement could be performed
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XIV Clustered Disk Arrays Get More Oomph And Capacity
July 26, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIBM has kicked out the third generation of its XIV clustered disk arrays, high-end machines for delivering lots of bandwidth and high-end software features such as thin provisioning, snapshotting, asynchronous and synchronous mirroring, and hot upgrades of cluster components.
Big Blue bought disk array upstart XIV back in January 2008 so it would have a clustered disk array that was more expandable and more resilient than the monolithic DS8000 series of high-end disk arrays, which are based on Power Systems servers. The XIV machines are based on Intel Xeon processors running Linux, with main memory serving as cache for disks.
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Big Blue Doesn’t Compete Against i Cloud Backup Vendors
July 25, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe midrange is a mouthy bunch, and we spend a lot of time telling IBM what it should do and what it should not do. Just for a change of pace, I want to point out something that Big Blue has not done and show you why this is a good thing.
Last week, in announcement letter 611-007, the company talked about its plan to offer the SmartCloud Virtualized Server Recovery on its SmartCloud compute and storage clouds. As the name suggests, this is a full managed service that allows companies to fail-over their workloads running on Windows or