Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Power Systems Turns In A Full Year Of Growth
January 25, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThere have been worse years in the Power Systems business than 2015, and in fact, 2014 was one of them. In its latest financial reports, IBM said that that it has turned in four quarters of revenue growth for the Power server unit, no doubt helped by an uptake of Power8 systems as customers do their inevitable upgrades. As the year wound down, IBM was running on its entry and high-end cylinders, the first time in a while when that happened.
IBM Systems, the hardware unit of the company that sells servers and storage and is responsible for operating system
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Where Do Those IBM i Machines Work?
January 18, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreWe may live in a big data world, but a lot of the data is not worth the magnetic media it is stored on. This is particularly true when it comes to the IBM i installed base, which used to be more aggressively diced and sliced by the big IT market researchers of the world back it was called the AS/400 and when it had a $14 billion ecosystem across hardware, software, and services.
But we do what we can in a world without much data about our ecosystem, and that is one of the reasons why IT Jungle has
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Throw Away Old Summary Query Techniques
January 12, 2016 Ted Holt
… Read moreIt’s a new year! Out with the old! In with the new! That exhortation applies not only to everyday life, but also to the ways we write SQL queries. Let me show you two ways we used to have to write summary queries and two new ways that are better.
First, we need a database to query. Here’s a table of customers.
ID Name === ===================== 101 J. Cheever Loophole 102 Otis B. Driftwood 103 Quincy Adams Wagstaff 104 Rufus T. Firefly
And here’s a table of shipments.
ID CUSTOMER ITEM QUANTITY PRICE === ======== ====== ======== ===== 1 102
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Updated RDi Keyboard Shortcuts
January 12, 2016 Susan Gantner
… Read moreI’ve written tips about RSE/RDi keyboard shortcuts several times before. Readers of those tips will know that I created a downloadable list of my favorite keyboard shortcuts. I’ve updated the shortcut card fairly regularly and the most recent edition has recently become available. So if you have previously downloaded my shortcut card and found it useful, you may want to get the latest one here.
This edition of the card includes a few new shortcuts, including a couple that are new for V9.5 of RDi.
The first one is Ctrl+Alt+Q, a new V9.5 shortcut to bring up a dialog
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Software Group Essentially Gone With Steve Mills Retirement
January 11, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe old guard at Big Blue has been gradually retiring over the past several years, and one of the most influential leaders of IBM and one of the more intelligent, successful, and well-spoken of the company’s top brass, retired at the end of 2015. We are talking, of course, about Steve Mills, who ran the Software Group conglomerate for the past decade and a half.
While it may not have been apparent to many of us on the outside, something was brewing during IBM’s reorganization this time last year, where a slew of new executives were given new divisions
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Happy Holidays From IT Jungle
December 9, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe weather may not know it in most of the Northern Hemisphere, but the holiday season will soon be fast upon us and that means it is time to put away the pens and keyboards here at IT Jungle and to spend some time with family and friends.
The Four Hundred has been a part of the IBM midrange community almost as long as the AS/400 and its progeny have been around, and like the AS/400 itself, The Four Hundred has antecedents that have an even longer history. The point is, we have been listening and learning about the IBM
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Happy Holidays From IT Jungle
December 9, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe weather may not know it in most of the Northern Hemisphere, but the holiday season will soon be fast upon us and that means it is time to put away the pens and keyboards here at IT Jungle and to spend some time with family and friends.
The Four Hundred has been a part of the IBM midrange community almost as long as the AS/400 and its progeny have been around, and like the AS/400 itself, The Four Hundred has antecedents that have an even longer history. The point is, we have been listening and learning about the IBM
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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