Timothy Prickett Morgan
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A Rising Tide
December 7, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe system business is roaring along in 2015, and it looks like the industry might devour a historic number of machines this year, if the first three quarters are any indication. The amount of capacity that companies are consuming is staggering, and not something the analysts at IDC or Gartner talk about when they put out their quarterly figures. But we like to think these things through.
It looks like Power Systems sales are on the rise, too. So maybe, just maybe, a tide is rising that will lift all boats a little. (Provided interest rate increases or some other
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Detecting A “Job End” Condition in DB2 for i
December 1, 2015 Hey, Mike
… Read moreAn ETL process extracts data from our ERP system and places it in our Business Intelligence systems. It runs 24/7 except for the End of Day process that shuts down the subsystem that it’s in. The SQL process we run ends up dying violently and the parent process fails (without recovering on startup). A graceful exit would be as simple as issuing a RETURN statement! Can SQL detect a shutdown process?
–D.S.
The ANSI SQL standard offers no specific guideline for implementing some kind of host shutdown process, so you’ll have to rely on the other special OS related views
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How Many Interfaces Are Enough (To Print A CSV File)?
December 1, 2015 Ted Holt
… Read moreNote: The code accompanying this article is available for download here.
CSV (comma-separated values) files have been part of my working world for years. I like them because they’re easy to build. Users like them because they can easily open them in Microsoft Excel. I’ve written about this before. Let’s end the year with a utility I wrote to print CSV files. I had fun writing it. Maybe you’ll find it useful in your shop.
When I need to read a CSV file on an IBM i system, I typically FTP the file from the IFS to a temporary
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End of Year Feedback
December 1, 2015 Ted Holt
… Read moreWe’ve made it through another year. I hope it’s been a good one for you in spite of the hardships and challenges. Let’s read some of the feedback that I received in 2015 and see what we can learn.
Hey, Ted:
To make a grep search case-insensitive, use the “-i” switch. I also add the “-n” switch to show the line number.
catsplf -j 681206/MYSELF/MYJOB QSYSPRT 1 | grep -in 'smith'
I also have a SCANSPLF command. It is not case insensitive, but that would not be hard to implement.
Keep the great articles coming.
–Bryan
Bryan wrote in
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Data Scrubbing Functions In DB2 For i
November 17, 2015 Hey, Mike
… Read moreImagine a character database field that stores a phone number. No formatting rules are involved, so the values in the column vary such as 8370155738, 837/015-5738, 837-015.5738, etc. We’d like to write an RPG program that allows the user to enter a number, formatted or not, onto the screen and if that string of numbers is found in the table’s phone column, show it to the user. Is there a way to use SQL to strip the non-numeric characters from the phone field, and select the record if the result matches the user input?
–Brad
Hi, Brad.
Scrubbing data is
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An Introduction to Processing XML with RPG, Part 4
November 17, 2015 Jon Paris
… Read moreNote: The code accompanying this article is available for download here.
In the first three parts of this series, I focused on the basics of using RPG’s XML-INTO. In this episode I want to wrap things up by covering two of the more recent additions to this support.
Let’s start with namespaces. I haven’t got time to go into all the whys and wherefores of namespaces. For now let’s just say that they allow you avoid name collisions by qualifying element and attribute names. Since you will encounter them in many documents it is important to understand the
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What Good Is Native .NET On Power?
November 16, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreAs many of you know, most of us at IT Jungle have advocated for some form of support for the Windows Server platform on Power-based systems since the advent of the PowerPC Alliance nearly 25 years ago. Back then, there really wasn’t a Windows Server platform at all, in fact, and it was not until that alliance that two things became clear: Microsoft had aspirations as a system software provider, and it intended to start down that road by making its Windows desktop operating system available on Power, Alpha, MIPS, and X86 processors.
Except for a few months in the
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R2D2 Is Alive And Well–Inside Your IBM i Server
November 9, 2015 Bob Losey
… Read moreR2D2? That little dome-headed droid that always kept the Star Wars heroes one step ahead of big trouble? Well, not exactly. The one we’re talking about doesn’t roll around, nor does he chirp. But, unlike the movie version, ours is real. He lives inside your IBM i server and he spends his life keeping you out of trouble. . . with never so much as a thank you from his owner.
It’s time he got a little respect, because he works day and night; not only “off the books” but entirely off your payroll. Nevertheless, he’s the best system administrator
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Spring Ahead, Fall Behind
November 9, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreMany of us have been in this community for a long time, and whether or not we mean to, some of us still call our platform the AS/400, or “the four hundred,” or even the iSeries because old habits die hard. Call it what you will, but this is still a community, and it is one that we are members of and, for the most part, one we are all proud to be members. I, for one, wish that we had a better sense of the breadth and depth of this community, something a bit more than just the results
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Why And How To Update The HMC
November 3, 2015 Larry Bolhuis
… Read moreI deliver a session on the HMC to many user groups, including COMMON. Attendance had been falling, so COMMON’s education team had decided to give the session just one more go. This time though I walked into a packed house, with people carrying in chairs and standing along the walls! “What brings you all here at 8 a.m.?” I asked. “You’re going to talk about updating the HMC, right?” was the response. You see IBM had just announced POWER6 severs, and that mandated newer code on the HMC.
Some of you may wonder what an HMC is, so let’s