Timothy Prickett Morgan
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IBM Wheels And Deals To Get IBM i Shops Current
May 23, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWe have been complaining a bit that IBM did not deliver new Power8+ processors and an expected bump in price/performance and lower prices as well to help stimulate the IBM i segment of the Power Systems business. But lo and behold, IBM is finally coming around to the idea that it has to actually do something to entice customers on old releases to move to the latest Power8 iron and to get their licensed program products and operating system on Software Maintenance.
The latest deal, called the IBM i License Transfer Promo, was unveiled at the COMMON conference last week
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RDi Debug Without SEPs
May 17, 2016 Susan Gantner
… Read moreI wrote a tip way back in 2007 about how easy it is to start a debug session using Service Entry Points (SEPs). Back then, the tool was still called WDSC, and at that time I mentioned that there were some occasions when SEPs wouldn’t work. So what can you do if you’re in one of those situations?
You can’t set an SEP on a program whose member type doesn’t end in LE. For example, with RPG or CLP programs. That’s not to say that you can’t debug non-LE programs when using SEPs–you simply can’t use one of those program
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Build SQL to Define Your Existing Files, Take 2
May 17, 2016 Ted Holt
… Read moreConverting physical files to tables is a good thing to do, but if you work in the sorts of shops where I’ve worked, you already have more than you can do and you don’t have time to fix what isn’t broken. However, if I could make it easy for you, maybe you’d find the time to convert physical files where doing so is to most advantageous. Let me show you how easy it can be.
First, you need a place to put the SQL DDL (data definition language) source.
crtpf mylib/sqlsrc
Second, you need an SQL client. I have used
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IBM Finally Gets Power8 Machines On SoftLayer Cloud
May 16, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreFor a company that is so eager to prove the value of the Power processors at the heart of its Power Systems machines, IBM has sure taken its time getting Power8-based systems onto its SoftLayer public cloud. IBM talked about adding Power iron to SoftLayer’s datacenters in the wake of the acquisition of the hoster and cloud provider back in June 2013, and it had bold plans to double the footprint of that cloud and to make Power iron a peer to Xeon-based systems.
These promised machines are now available, and they are, in an indirect way, a significant thing
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Jazzing Up IBM i In COMMON’s Quarter
May 16, 2016 Alex Woodie and Dan Burger
… Read moreNew Orleans has taken on a decidedly IBM i tint thanks to the start of COMMON‘s Annual Meeting and Expo over the weekend. An estimated 1,100 attendees are in the Big Easy for the four-day show, which began Sunday morning with remarks by COMMON president Kevin Mort, and also featured a glimpse into the future of Power Systems, courtesy of IBM Power Systems executives Steve Sibley and Stephanie Chiras.
The spring COMMON conference is still the biggest IBM i show on earth and provides attendees a chance to beef up their skills, socialize with other IBM i professionals, check
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When You Reach Your Break(ing) Point. . . Or Not
May 10, 2016 Susan Gantner
… Read moreI’m always surprised at how well-attended my RDi debugging presentations are. After all, once you know about service entry points, there’s not a huge amount that’s new and radically different about debugging, even with RDi. Then again, I’m constantly learning new things. Here’s something I learned just last week, in fact.
Let’s assume that you already have a debug session running on the troublesome program and we’ll look at setting and using breakpoints. The most obvious and common way to set one is to position your cursor on the statement where you want it. From there, you can use
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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,
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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
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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,
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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