Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Reader Feedback On Mad Dog 21/21: In Hack Signo Vinces
July 18, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe opening statement about IBM‘s site being hacked is semi-interesting but has nothing to do with the iSeries. The only people hosting Web sites on the iSeries are us, the iSeries customers, certainly not IBM.
The info given is good–never can have enough info about security–but has nothing to do with the hack, or preventing the hack. The IBM i operating system and the PowerPC instruction set eliminate most hack gambits. DB2 usage eliminates another class of gambits based on SQL Server. What’s left is lame Web page programming that allows SQL injection or cross-site scripting, has nothing to
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Still Wanted: A Power-i System of Systems
July 18, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIBM is all about “smarter systems” and “workload optimized systems” these days in its marketing, and as far as I can tell, in the past two years the company has not done anything to bring the kinds of focused design it has for supercomputing and mainframe shops, just to name two, to bear on the Power Systems/IBM i base. And I think the company is missing a big opportunity to re-engage in a big way with those midrange customers.
What got me to thinking about this, of course, was last week’s launch by Big Blue of the mini mainframe called
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How Do I Email a PC5250 Screen Shot?
July 13, 2011 Hey, Joe
… Read moreI want to email a PC5250 screen shot. But when I press the Print Screen key, nothing happens. It doesn’t copy my screen to the Windows clipboard and I can’t paste it into my email. What am I doing wrong? I’m using the PC5250 product that comes with iSeries Access V5R4M0.
–Jay
By default, most Windows programs capture your entire desktop display image to the Windows clipboard when you press the PRT key (on some keyboards, you press the PrtSc key, instead). PRT copies the entire desktop image to the clipboard, including all visible Windows and the Windows toolbar.
Alternatively,
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The DB2 DBA: Identifying Indexes with Shared Access Paths
July 13, 2011 Hey, Mike
… Read moreThe SysIndexStat catalog view has the column Owning_Index_Owner (plus schema, system names, etc.). However, that catalog view does not include constraint-created indexes, nor does it include keyed logical and physical files that share the access path owned by an SQL index. The DSPFD command does show the SQL index that owns the access path for such logical files, but I have not been able to generate this information in an outfile format from that command.
The information must exist somewhere (since it shows on screen) and I would think it would be in one of the file description APIs, but
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Running Totals in an SQL Query, Take 2
July 13, 2011 Skip Marchesani
… Read moreMy article, Running Totals in an SQL Query, described how to write an SQL SELECT statement that generated a running total for each row in the result set and provided an example of the SELECT statement syntax to do so.
While the SELECT statement was syntactically correct, it had an omission and did not work correctly in a certain data situation. Several readers figured this out and were good enough to send an email note to make me aware of the situation. I very much appreciate the emails.
I want readers to know that the article was a test
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Public Clouds Like Cheap Iron, Private Clouds Like the Expensive Stuff
July 11, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIf there is a bright lining to the advent of cloud computing–virtualized and highly automated server, storage, and networking capacity–it is that not every application can or should be on a public cloud and that the kind of machine embodied by a Power Systems server running the IBM i operating system is, in fact, what one might build a private cloud upon.
The wizards at IDC have been polishing their crystal balls lately, as we report elsewhere in this issue referring to IT spending growth projections in the United States. But the people who live and breathe servers also put
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PostgreSQL Database On Power Systems-IBM i? Why Not?
July 11, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe profile of the open source PostgreSQL database has been rising in recent months, and you can run it on an IBM i platform if you have a Web application that requires that database.
PostgreSQL got an immediate boost the minute that Oracle closed its $7.4 billion acquisition of Sun Microsystems in January 2010. That’s because Sun owned the popular MySQL database at that point, and companies that did not want to be beholden to Oracle, which owns a slew of databases after many acquisitions and much internal databases. A heavily modified PostgreSQL database is embedded in IBM‘s Netezza
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IBM Revives BladeCenter Chassis Giveaway
July 11, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIt’s baaaaaaack. . . . IBM‘s BladeCenter chassis first-in-location giveaway deal, I mean. Not aliens from the other side in the television.
Last week, in announcement letter 311-087, Big Blue revived an on-again, off-again freebie BladeCenter chassis deal, which gives customers a freebie enclosure when installing blade servers for the first time in a location inside their company. The intent is to cushion the blow on moving from tower or rack servers to blades, which offer all kinds of integration and management benefits but which are also more expensive than tower or rack servers of equivalent oomph and
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Reader Feedback on Building a Legacy
July 11, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreTimothy:
Great article!!! In your statement about “Windows server variants” being almost 20 years old, does that include Microsoft SQL Server? Just wondering if that is considered “legacy” nowadays.
But, since you define one of the characteristics of legacy as being “stable,” maybe SQL Server is really not legacy.
Thank you again for a great article.
–Doug
Er, I suppose SQL Server is legacy, especially when you consider it is actually derived from Sybase‘s Sybase System and later SQL Server, which date from the late 1980s and early 1990s, respectively.
TPM, it is always a privilege to read your
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Gartner, IDC Boost IT Spending Outlooks For 2011
July 11, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreContrary to how you might be feeling personally or what your boss might be telling you about there being no money for raises and bonuses or all that shiny new hardware you want for the data center, it looks like the IT departments of the world are going to be given a little bit more money to play with, according to the latest forecasts from Gartner. And IT spending growth in the United States, says IDC, is set to double-time the rate of change for gross domestic product this year, too.
Gartner upped its forecast for IT spending