Timothy Prickett Morgan
-
Finding Duplicate Rows in a Name and Address Table
May 25, 2011 Skip Marchesani
… Read moreMany companies still use the U.S. Postal Service to mail promotional and marketing materials to existing and potential customers. With rising printing expenses and postal rates, it’s important to minimize waste by identifying and eliminating duplicate rows in name and address tables. However, these tables can present some interesting challenges.
For instance, the following two addresses are duplicates, but how do you identify them as potential duplicate rows?
John Sampson
Dickerson Mutual Ins.
218 Bridge St., Suite 257
New York, NY 12345John Samson
Dickerson Insurance
218 Bridge Street
NYC, NY 12345Companies can write their own software, which has
-
Attachmate Busts Apart SUSE from Novell, Puts Own People in Charge
May 23, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreNow that Attachmate has finished up its acquisition of Novell, the private equity-backed conglomerate of midrange software companies has set about breaking the company into two different halves.
For those of you who run SUSE Linux on your iSeries, System i, or Power Systems logical partitions, SUSE is now a separate division of Attachmate, much as Attachmate (with the Attachmate and WRQ products) was separate from the NetIQ security products. With the break, the SUSE Linux business and its related openSUSE development project are now separated from the burden of trying to save Novell and its NetWare and GroupWise
-
Red Hat, IBM, and Friends Gang Up On VMware, Ignore PowerVM
May 23, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreAs IBM knows full well, when you are the 800-pound gorilla, the juggernaut, or the leviathan in any part of the IT industry–and you are making money–then everyone is gunning for you. And with the pole position in the X64 server virtualization racket, and a desire to extend that to virtualized PCs and tablets as well as to cloudy infrastructure, VMware has big red bull’s eyes plastered all over itself.
Last week, server and desktop virtualization wannabe Red Hat teamed up with IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Intel, SUSE (now part of Attachmate), BMC Software, and Eucalyptus Systems
-
Avnet Rides Server and Storage Waves in Fiscal Q3
May 23, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreJust like its rival Arrow Electronics, master IT distributor Avnet is riding an upgrade cycle for servers and storage.
In the third quarter of fiscal 2011 ended April 2, Avnet posted $6.67 billion, up a very impressive 40.3 percent. Net income for the seller of IT gear and electronic components rose by 31.9 percent, to $151 million. Acquisitions are a big part of that growth story, of course, and on a pro forma basis excluding the effect of companies that have been brought into the Avnet fold, sold off, or unit movements within the company, overall revenues for Avnet
-
Enterprise Software Spending Grows Faster Than Expected
May 23, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe enterprise software market–everything from the hypervisor up through the operating system to databases, middleware, and applications–got back on something akin to an even keel as 2010 came to a close, according to the latest statistics from Gartner.
That enterprise software stack also includes corporate purchases of Windows, Mac OS, and Linux operating systems for PCs and laptops as well as applications for PCs, so the money does mount up. To $244.6 billion, in fact, which is 8.5 percent higher than spending on the same kinds of enterprise software in 2009, when the world was just starting to consider
-
Still Wanted: A Cheap–or Free—IBM i Development Workstation
May 23, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreI attended the Long Island System User Group‘s May Education Day last week along with my compatriot and editor of Four Hundred Guru, Ted Holt. While everybody was chewing on their dinner, I was asked to sing for my supper and talk about the IBM i platform along with Pete Massiello, president of both COMMON and iTech Solutions Group, and Al Grega, who was in charge of IBM’s worldwide Rational tools sales for the past three years and has now taken over WebSphere sales for Big Blue’s server platforms.
The topics ranged far and wide, but this
-
IBM i Chief Architect Tells Us Where We’re At
May 23, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWhen you are the IBM i chief architect, you are not just the top techie in charge of the platform, but you are also the unofficial and sometimes the official spokesperson for the platform to the outside world. That job was handled by Frank Soltis, the father of the System/38 and the grandfather of the AS/400, for more than three decades. And for the past couple of years, Steve Will has been chief architect and spokesperson, and has lately been making the rounds talking about where the IBM i platform is and where it is going.
Will took the IBM
-
Admin Alert: Running System i Cleanup Manually
May 18, 2011 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreA reader recently wrote me inquiring about some of the finer points in running the i operating system’s cleanup tasks for clearing out messages, job logs, and other system output. While IBM offers a decent automated cleanup function, it’s not quite as clear how to manually run the cleanup option. This week, I’ll review what cleanup tasks do and show you how to run this function either automatically or manually.
What Are the Cleanup Tasks?
Cleanup is an i operating system task for manually or automatically cleaning up user messages; system and workstation messages; system journals, job logs and log
-
The Case of the Missing Logical File
May 18, 2011 Hey, Mike
… Read moreI created a logical file that combines multiple tables into a single result set (similar to a SQL UNION.) However, when Microsoft Excel’s Query Wizard presents a list of available tables and views to query, this logical file does not show up in the list. What is the problem?
Suzy
Hi, Suzy:
The problem is that DB2 for i is classifying your logical file as a non-relational file. It turns out that the Microsoft Excel Query Wizard uses ODBC (or OLE DB for Excel 2007 and later) to access DB2 for i. When tools like the Query Wizard and Crystal
-
An Introduction to Python on IBM i, Part 3
May 18, 2011 Garry Taylor
… Read moreNote: The code accompanying this article is available for download here.
Guido Van Rossum, creator of Python, once said, “Python is an experiment in how much freedom programmers need. Too much freedom and nobody can read another’s code; too little and expressiveness is endangered.”
In this third part of our introduction to Python on our faithful IBM i, you’ll learn how to use the expressiveness of Python while still keeping your code readable. This will be achieved by creating classes to represent our data in a clean and manageable fashion. You have likely heard of classes and object from