Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Power9 Gets Ready To Roll In Systems In 2017
August 29, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIn about a year or so, a radically different Power processor family will be embedded as the motors in the Power Systems machines that will drive IBM i applications into the future. The forthcoming Power9 chips, which IBM’s top techies unveiled at the Hot Chips conference in Silicon Valley last week, are as always packed with lots of technical innovation. But that is not the main thing that IBM i shops should be ebullient about.
The real innovation that will drive the Power platform forward is the OpenPower Foundation and the fact that Big Blue has rearchitected its chips and
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The Prospects For A Power9 Revolution
August 22, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreAs a relative underdog as a supplier of processors in the datacenter now that it has left the X86 server market and has gone from being a partner of Intel to a direct competitor that is fostering its own ecosystem in the richest and most competitive parts of the market, IBM wants for the Power processor to be able to take on the Xeon chip and win. The Power9 chip from Big Blue has about the best chance of any chip we have seen from IBM since the Power4 way back in 2001 to do this.
The top chip engineers
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Overlaid Packed Data In Data Structures
August 16, 2016 Jon Paris
… Read moreNote: The code accompanying this article is available for download here.
Sometimes things that should be simple give us difficulty. Jon Paris recently helped a Four Hundred Guru reader to solve a problem with overlaid packed-decimal data in data structures. We’re sharing their conversation for the benefit of others.
Hi, Jon:
My question has to do with overlaid packed-decimal data in a data structure. I store a date in CYMD format in a seven-digit, packed-decimal field. I am trying to extract the two-digit year from that.
Dcl-Ds cymdDate; currentDate packed(7); currentYear packed(2) overlay(currentDate:2); End-Ds;
When I set
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Talking Modernization With Profound Logic
August 15, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreModernization, in its many guises, seems to be a big driver of the IBM i ecosystem these days. For a long time, high availability software was major propellant diving the market alongside System/38 and System/36 upgrades–a kind of modernization effort in its own right. Then along came the ERP wave in the 1990s, and packaged software is all the rage. Now, the diehard IBM i faithful need to update their code to work with modern devices and to look and feel like other modern software, and they need some help.
A programmer or two using good tools are perhaps better
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Big Blue Adds IBM i To EasyScale MSP Deal
August 8, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreBack in January, when IBM announced a new deal to help make it easier for managed service providers–what we used to call hosting companies and sometimes incorrectly call cloud builders even if they are not building truly cloudy infrastructure–to build out their gear based on Power Systems iron. We complained at the time that the deal was only available for AIX and Linux systems, and should be extended to those who want to build IBM i clouds.
Lo and behold, IBM has listened and the EasyScale for MSP deal has now been extended to include the IBM i operating system,
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Give Me Fewer (Not More!) Parameters, Please!
August 2, 2016 Ted Holt
… Read moreToday’s musings fall into the “why would anybody want to do that?” category. “Why would anybody want to be president?” asks Barack Obama. “Why would anybody steal a groundhog?” asks Rita in Groundhog Day. My question is, “Why would anybody pass 16,382 parameters to a subprocedure?” There is a better way.
I stand second to none in my admiration for parameters. The first system I learned to program, the IBM System/3 Model 12, allowed no parameter passing to RPG programs or OCL procedures. Cloning diminished–and life improved–when I started working on a S/34, which allowed OCL procedures to receive
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CHAIN vs SELECT INTO
August 2, 2016 Chuck Luttor
… Read moreThe average RPG developer can quickly become proficient in replacing RPG database operation codes with their SQL equivalents when undertaking new programming. In each installment of this series, I will visit an op code or set of op codes in order to prove my contention. First up today is CHAIN.
I remember the CHAIN op code from System/3 Model 6 and Model 10 disk days. (Yes, I have been around for a long, long time.) It has been used extensively by every RPG programmer since then. It is the basic op code for random access. In the “old days” it
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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