Timothy Prickett Morgan
-
IBM To Sell Off Two-Thirds Of The Rochester Labs
May 9, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThis news is not entirely unexpected, but it is difficult just the same. The word on the street is that IBM will be selling off about 2 million square feet of the legendary Rochester Labs in the coming year. That is about two thirds of the capacity of the facility, which once housed over 8,000 employees and was the center of gravity for the IBM midrange since it was conceived in 1969.
The Rochester Labs, which were established in 1956, are a bit older and were part of the geographic distribution that Big Blue has always liked in its operations,
-
IBM Melds FlashSystem With XIV To Scale Enterprise Flash
May 9, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreOver the past few weeks, we have been analyzing the new flash modules and controllers that IBM has made available for plugging into Power Systems machines and significantly boosting the performance of the storage arrays under the skins of the servers. This week, we will take a look at the new FlashSystem all-flash arrays from Big Blue, which are aimed at much larger workloads that cannot fit within the system.
The two new FlashSystems that IBM announced concurrent with the internal flash storage back in April are much heftier machines than it has been peddling to date, and the more
-
Refacing Your Database, Part 3
May 3, 2016 Paul Tuohy
… Read moreIn the preceding two articles, we saw how to extract, analyze and correct table and column definitions. In this, the final article on refacing your database, we look at some more options for re-representing data and, finally, generating a script to create the required views.
Handling Numeric Date Fields
One of the issues we need to handle is the representation of dates in the SASALHST table. Figure 1 shows how the purchase date is stored as a numeric field, the order date is stored as a year, month and day and the delivery date is stored as a century, year,
-
Dealing With Library Lists In RDi
May 3, 2016 Ted Holt
… Read moreNote: The code accompanying this article is available for download here.
Today I follow up on a topic that Susan Gantner covered a few years ago, namely, how to more easily manage the library list while working in Rational Developer for i (RDi). It turns out that a couple of commands I wrote for green-screen work years ago are even more useful in my GUI development environment.
When you start RDi, the library list is set according to your user profile, but you can override the initial library list in the connection properties. As you work, you may
-
Why Node.js?
May 3, 2016 Aaron Bartell
… Read moreIn case you haven’t noticed, IBM’er Tim Rowe and his team have been delivering a tremendous amount of open source the past few years–sometimes through vendor relationships and sometimes directly from IBM. While frequency has increased as of late, open source has actually been a mainstay on IBM i and its predecessors for a very long time. It started with the Apache web server, then Java, then PHP and MySQL, Ruby, Node.js, Python, and even more you haven’t even heard of. Open source (in particular Node.js) will be the topic of this article. But first, let me give you some
-
Making The Case For Flash Over Disk In Power Systems
May 2, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreTwo weeks ago, concurrent with the launch of IBM i 7.3, Big Blue announced a slew of new flash storage drives and storage controllers, which we told you about based on the announcement letters as we normally do. Since that time, we have got our hands on some internal analysis that IBM has done for Power Systems partners and customers, and are sharing that with you to help in your buying decisions as you contemplate adding flash to your systems or, perhaps, even going all flash.
Enterprises are doing it, now that the price for effective capacity after data compression
-
IBM i Scalability Stays The Same With 7.3
April 25, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreAll operating systems are not created equal, at least not when it comes to NUMA scalability. For a long time now, the IBM i operating system has trailed the scalability of its peers, AIX and Linux, on Power processors when it comes to spanning the large number of cores and threads that IBM forges into its Power machinery.
Back in the dawn of time, and many of you were there with me, it was a very exciting thing to even be able to have a two-processor, two-thread machine like the AS/400-D80, which made its debut in April 1991 and which
-
New Financials At IBM Can’t Mask Growth Issues
April 25, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIt is easy to say that the IBM we know today, or more precisely are trying to get to know as it undergoes its changes, is far different from the one that we were trying to understand two decades ago as it was going through another tumultuous transformation. The Big Blue from the middle 1990s was a systems company before and after that change, but it is harder to see the International Business Machines skeleton inside the new Big Blue.
But if you dig around, that core systems business is still there, even after IBM has completely reclassified its financials
-
Refacing Your Database, Part 2
April 19, 2016 Paul Tuohy
… Read moreThe whole purpose of refacing our database is to give proper names to tables and columns. So we have to spend some time ensuring that our names are right. In this article, the second in a series of three, we continue the refacing process by analyzing and correcting our new naming.
In my first article, we had reached the stage where we had extracted table and column definitions into our two conversion tables (TABLE_TRANSLATION and COLUMN_TRANSLATION), as shown below:
Analyzing the Names
Since the new column names were generated from the text descriptions of the original fields, there is
-
View Scheduled Jobs with Excel
April 19, 2016 Ted Holt
… Read moreAt the recent RPG & DB2 Summit in Dallas, I presented a session that dealt with the use of SQL in CL. One of my examples used the SCHEDULED_JOB_INFO view to retrieve scheduled jobs from the IBM i job scheduler. After the talk, one of the attendees gave me a great idea, and I’ve just got to pass it along to you.
SCHEDULED_JOB_INFO returns the same information that you can see with the Work with Job Schedule Entries (WRKJOBSCDE) command. It’s one of the IBM i Services. The gentleman told me that he and others in his shop had been