Timothy Prickett Morgan
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The Value Of Things That Don’t Change–And Those That Must
March 28, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe wide expectation is that IBM will announce the next iteration of the IBM i operating system, up until now known as iNext and now thought to be IBM i 7.3, at its TechU conference in Atlanta, Georgia, on April 12. That is a week ahead of when COMMON is hosting a webinar with IBM i chief architect Steve Will to talk about new features in the platform, so the cat is out of the bag.
The word we hear on the street is that there will be significant enhancements to the database and to the security systems of the
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Generating An Insert Script From Existing Data
March 15, 2016 Paul Tuohy
… Read moreI was recently presented with an interesting conundrum. Can you generate an INSERT statement for data that currently exists in a table?
For example, let’s say a table contained the following data:
EMPID NAME GRADE BIRTHDATE JOINEDDATE SALARY 00001 Test AA 1956-05-14 2001-10-10 0.00 00002 Test2 - Has Null AA null null null
Could I generate the corresponding insert statement similar to the following:
insert into TESTSTUFF/TESTEMP (EMPID, NAME, GRADE, BIRTHDATE, JOINEDDATE, SALARY) values ('00001', 'Test', 'AA', '1956-05-14', '2001-10-10', .00), ('00002', 'Test2 - Has Null', 'AA', NULL, NULL, NULL);The original request was to generate an insert script for all
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Dealing With A MIN/MAX Quirk
March 15, 2016 Ted Holt
… Read moreThe MIN and MAX functions have been a part of SQL since the beginning. A database-kind-of-guy-or-gal would think that anything so established would be stable to the point of boredom, but a database-kind-of-guy-or-gal would be wrong. MIN and MAX don’t even work the same way in all implementations of SQL, and to top it off, they have a quirk that I come upon occasionally.
MIN and MAX began as aggregate functions. As such, they locate the minimum and maximum non-null values within a column across a set of rows. On this, everyone in the database world is in agreement. The
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Getting Started With IBM i And .Net XMLSERVICE Connectivity
March 15, 2016 Richard Schoen
… Read moreIn my last article I introduced you to XMLSERVICE for accessing IBM i data and discussed why you might want to consider using the XMLSERVICE .Net wrapper API to connect to and utilize live IBM i data from your .Net applications. In this article, I will cover an overview of XMLSERVICE and the .Net wrapper API I created for .Net developers to use IBM i data without needing to install IBM i access. You will also get a chance to do your first connectivity test to the IBM i using the XMLSERVICE for .Net API.
Getting Started
For this session
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More Thoughts On A Hybrid System Of Systems
March 14, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIf IBM is going to take on the hegemony of Intel in the datacenter, it is going to have to do a lot more than just crank up the core count of the Power processors and license them to partners so they can make their own chips and machines. That is a good start, but what IBM and its OpenPower partners need to do is make a new kind of system that brings all of the current workloads in the datacenter together and also allows for new workloads to be run natively and in an accelerated fashion on top of
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Five Pitfalls of VTL Data Storage in IBM i Environments
March 9, 2016 Chris Bremer
… Read moreIn this busy world, where IT engineers are expected to do more with less, there is an urgency to make quick decisions, even when it comes to big decisions like data storage. Within an IBM i environment, data storage can get complicated. Retrofitting new storage solutions–such virtual tape libraries (VTLs)–with AS/400 servers is tricky. Here are some missteps that IBM i shops do not want to make.
Not Calculating the Proper System Size
Sizing is often overlooked, and is most certainly the most crucial step in the process of selecting a storage solution. An improperly sized storage solution has a
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IBM Kills Off Flex p260+ Node, Offers PureSystems Trade-In
March 7, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIf you are one of the relatively few customers who bought Flex Systems modular servers from IBM based on its Power7 and Power7+ processors, you had better get the lead out if you need to add some iron to your systems.
In announcement letter 916-028, IBM said that it was going to be withdrawing the Flex System p260+ server nodes, which are based on Power7+ processors, from its catalog starting on November 18. A slew of networking features, including switches and adapters, are having the plug pulled on them on March 8, and so are memory and storage features
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A Possibly Coherent Future Power Hybrid System
March 7, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreFrom the looks of things, we can expect to see new Power Systems machines based on the Power8+ processors from IBM in the next several months. With new iron on the way and the server, storage, and networking markets all undergoing tumultuous change, now is a good time to examine the place of the IBM i platform in the modern datacenter and how it might be better integrated with the other systems that coexist with it.
Having to say such a sentence was never part of the original System/38 and AS/400 plan, of course. And perhaps the midrange IT world
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The Three Sources Of RUNSQLSTM
March 1, 2016 Ted Holt
… Read moreThe Run SQL Statements (RUNSQLSTM) command executes a file of SQL and/or CL commands. If you’ve used this command, you probably know that RUNSQLSTM reads the commands from a source physical file member. But did you know that there are two other places from which it can read SQL commands?
First, the usual way. Here’s member LOADPLANTS in source physical file SCRIPTS.
CREATE TABLE PLANTS (ID DEC(3), LOCATION VARCHAR(24), PRIMARY KEY (ID)); INSERT INTO PLANTS VALUES ( 1, 'Lost Angeles'), ( 2, 'New Yolk'), ( 3, 'Waste Virginia');
To create the PLANTS table and initialize it with data, do this:
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Easy Printing From CL
March 1, 2016 Ted Holt
… Read moreCL cannot write to printer files. This is understandable, since CL fits into the category of job control languages. Even though I’d never use CL to build an aged receivables report, there are times when it is advantageous for a CL program to generate a report (i.e., produce a spooled file), and here are two fairly easy ways to do that.
Suppose you have a CL program that runs three RPG programs in nightly batch processing. There are people in your organization who need to know whether these programs ran successfully or not. If you could build a short spooled