Timothy Prickett Morgan
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At The End Of The Power8 Long Tail
July 25, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreLargely for economic reasons relating to IBM‘s high costs in chip manufacturing and relatively low chip volumes, the Power Systems platform left the familiar cadence of Moore’s Law progress quite a while ago. IBM stretched it out to three years or more between processor cycles, and here we are in the middle of 2016 and we are still probably at least a year away from the Power9 launch. At the tail end of any product cycle revenues are bound to dip, and this is precisely what is happening to segments of the Power Systems line.
The bad news for
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A Second Look At SQL Descriptors
July 19, 2016 Paul Tuohy
… Read moreNote: The code accompanying this article is available for download here.
My previous article, A First Look at SQL Descriptors, looked at how SQL descriptors can be used in constructing and processing dynamic SQL statements. This article examines how SQL descriptors can be used in processing the information returned through a dynamic SQL statement.
As an example, we will write a program that dynamically constructs the select clause in an SQL select statement. Traditionally, this would cause us a problem in our RPG programs since we would not be able to code the INTO clause correctly. We have
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A Generic Character Editing Routine
July 12, 2016 Jon Paris
… Read moreNote: The code accompanying this article is available for download here.
Recently I was asked if I knew of a way to edit character strings. For example, take a character string representing a product code such as “AX12345Q” and edit it to produce “AX-123-45 Q”. My initial reaction was to reach for an edit word, but sadly they only work for numerics, for some strange reason. I set about building a subprocedure that offered the necessary flexibility in insert characters and also added a few “defenses” against mismatched parameters.
Before describing the code, let’s look at the prototype for
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Maxava Opens Up Bidding For iFoundation Grants
July 11, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreFor the sixth year running now, high availability software maker Maxava is putting its money where its mouth is in the IBM i community and donating a big bag of cash through its Maxava iFoundation to causes that benefit the maintenance and expansion of the IBM i community.
Maxava launched its first iFoundation grants back in April 2011, promising to pay up to $50,000, in increments of up to $2,000 a pop, to organizations in the IBM i community that could use a little extra help in fulfilling their missions. Every little bit helps, in the first year $45,000
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What Price Power (Eight And Maybe Nine)?
July 11, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreCall me old school if you want, but I believe in Moore’s Law and I believe that IT vendors have to keep giving customers more bang for the buck if they want organizations to keep investing in technology. There are basically only two levers to help push a new technology into the market, and that is increasing the performance of a device or lowering its price, the latter hopefully occurring if the cost of production comes down but sometimes not as vendors seek to maximize their profits and make it up with performance leaps.
This has certainly been the case
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Power Systems GM Weights In On AS/400 Birthday
June 27, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreAny business unit within a conglomerate as vast and changing as fast as Big Blue needs to have a strong advocate as well as core financial performance that contributes to both the top and bottom line. The good news about the IBM i platform is that it has such a strong advocate in Doug Balog, general manager of the Power Systems business for the past several years. While Balog has been instrumental in pushing Linux on Power and putting together the OpenPower Foundation that is seeking to expand the Power ecosystem beyond the walls of IBM, he has not
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The AS/400 At 28: A HENRY, Not A DINK
June 20, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreA lot of people get credit for the work that went into creating IBM midrange systems over the decades, and rightfully so since the creation of such machinery, including the hardware and the software, takes many hundreds or thousands of individuals with each successive generation. It is appropriate to think about them as the AS/400, the forebear of the current Power Systems IBM i system, turns 28.
That is a long time in a human life, and an even longer time in computer history, where a generation has spanned from 12 to 24 months instead of decades. The funny bit
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The Basics Of XML-SAX
June 14, 2016 Jon Paris
… Read moreNote: The code accompanying this article is available for download here.
In XML-INTO And Optional Elements, I showed a reader how he could use XML-INTO to parse an XML document that effectively contained one of two completely different payloads. As I noted in that article, for this type of “does the document contain X” processing, XML-SAX can be a better choice than XML-INTO. That is the task that I’m going to demonstrate in this tip.
In his email, the reader mentioned that his original intent had been to simply identify the type of payload (Report or Event) and
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The Server Refresh Cycle Loses Steam
June 13, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWith one way of looking at it, the server market that drives the IT business is very mature and relatively flat, which shows demand for compute (and in some cases storage) remains steady and healthy. But in another way of looking at it, in a world obsessed by growth and often demanding it to drive revenues, profits, and stock prices, the server market has taken a dip and this is bad news.
Which way is it? Like an electron, perhaps, it is neither and both at the same time.
What we can tell you is that the box counters at
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Talking IBM i Ecosystem With HelpSystems CEO Chris Heim
June 13, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThere has been a flurry of acquisitions in the IBM i marketplace in the past several years–you might even call it a blizzard. That got me to thinking last week about the changes in the OS/400 and IBM i ecosystem that we have seen in the past several decades, which I talked about in an essay last week.
HelpSystems has built one of the largest software business dedicated to the IBM i platform. Infor could have a larger one, and Vision Solutions might, too, but they are all private companies so we can’t tell. Fresche, with its recent