Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Magic Software Rises Despite Devaluing U.S. Dollar
August 17, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreHot on the heels of its announcement of enhancements to an in-memory data grid for its Magic xpa application development environment that will eventually support the IBM i platform, Magic Software turned in pretty good numbers in its most recent quarter despite the compressing effects of current fluctuations that are affecting all global IT suppliers.
In the second quarter ended in June, Magic said that it had increased revenues by 4.6 percent to $42.5 million. Gross profits were down 4.4 percent to $15 million, but the revenue bump was large enough to cover the gap and net income actually rose
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What Will IBM i Do With A Power10 Processor?
August 17, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe gap between what is needed and what is provided has been growing and growing for years, and we don’t talk about that very much in the IBM i base. As someone who loves big iron with lots of horsepower, I tend to look on each new Power chip rollout as a chance for the IBM i platform to capture more and more work. While this happens at a number of shops that mix IBM i and Linux workloads–and sometimes AIX, too–for the most part, the IBM i platform is a silo in the datacenter even if other applications tickle
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The IBM i Market Is Not Economics 101
August 10, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIt is a time of transition for the Power Systems line, and that is one of the reasons why sales have been picking up in recent quarters. The full Power8 product line has been rounded out and is shipping in volume, from the smallest single-socket box up to the biggest, baddest 16-socket server. The Power7+ processors have been in midrange machines since October 2012 and came to entry machines in February 2013 and are winding down in the channel. With IBM i 5.4 sunsetted and IBM i 6.1 saddling up for its ride to the west, this is when we
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Know Your PTF Group Level Currency In 30 Seconds Or Less!
August 4, 2015 Larry Bolhuis
… Read moreThe IBM i is one of the easiest to maintain operating systems going. A big part of that is because IBM provides the hardware, operating system, and updates. Clearly the number of permutations are reduced dramatically. In addition, some problematic areas, such as video drivers, simply don’t exist in IBM i. So that’s it then, no need to update because we live in Utopia, right? Well, not so fast!
Just because IBM provides all the pieces doesn’t mean they are either perfect or complete. Besides, there are many components and these are constantly being updated. Two examples are node.js and
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Where Do Library Lists Reside?
August 4, 2015 Ted Holt
… Read moreI often sit and ponder the mysteries of life. For example, why do some people use C to write business applications? Why does the text of message SQL6789 end in a period instead of a question mark? And, recently, why do people circumvent powerful features of the robust IBM i operating system? Let me show you what I mean.
The circumvented feature that is on my mind at present is the library list. In case you’re new to the IBM i world, the library list is a list of libraries that the system searches when looking for an object. It’s
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An Introduction To Processing XML With RPG, Part 1: The Basics
August 4, 2015 Jon Paris
… Read moreNote: The code accompanying this article is available for download here.
RPG IV’s built-in XML support has been available for some time now, having been originally introduced with V5R4 back in 2006. Due to deficiencies in that release, many RPG’ers chose not to use RPG to process XML. Fortunately, IBM has corrected those deficiencies, and RPG provides a smart way to read XML. Here’s how it’s done.
In that first release, the most powerful of the op codes, XML-INTO, had some gaps in its support that sometimes made it difficult to use without pre-processing the XML. In addition, the
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Strong Dollar Hurts Power Systems Sales In Q2
July 27, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIt is a story that every big multinational public organization is telling as they reveal their financial results for the second quarter of the year. Economic uncertainty in parts of Europe, South America, and Asia have pushed up the value of the U.S. dollar relative to the other currencies, which is great if you are an American traveling. But if you are an American corporation bringing a big chunk of your overseas sales back home for financial reporting, it is not so much fun.
Such is the case with IBM‘s Power Systems line during the quarter ended in June,
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How Much Temporary Storage Is In Use And Who Is Using It?
July 21, 2015 Pete Massiello
… Read moreI recently visited the site of a company that had a problem of increasing disk utilization. The staff had run all the GO DISKTASK reports and nothing seemed to be getting bigger. Unfortunately, there hasn’t been an easy way of finding who is using temporary storage. Displaying the amount of used temporary storage was so obscure that most System Administrators had no idea where to look. Let me show you how to see: (1) the amount of temporary storage that is being used; and (2) the jobs are using the most.
Temporary storage is mostly associated with jobs on your
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Clamoring For Attention
July 21, 2015 Ted Holt
… Read moreYou know how to send a message to the system operator message queue. Here’s some code you can use when you need that message to stand out.
Here’s the CL code.
dcl &Message *char 434 dcl &Line1 *char 74 stg(*defined) defvar(&Message 1) dcl &Line2 *char 72 stg(*defined) defvar(&Message 75) dcl &Line3 *char 72 stg(*defined) defvar(&Message 147) dcl &Line4 *char 72 stg(*defined) defvar(&Message 219) dcl &Line5 *char 72 stg(*defined) defvar(&Message 291) dcl &Line6 *char 72 stg(*defined) defvar(&Message 363) ChgVar &Line1 ' **************************************+ *********************************' ChgVar &Line2 '*' ChgVar &Line3 '* Test message -- please ignore. ' ChgVar &Line4 '* More important information' -
IBM’s Migration Plan To PurePower Systems
July 13, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreMore than anything else, IBM is a systems company, and it always has been. We could argue about whether or not Big Blue should have ever exited the application software business, as it started to do in the late 1980s and finished off doing in the early 1990s, but I don’t think there would be much of an argument that IBM has been and should continue to be a supplier of full systems of servers, storage, networking, and systems software like operating systems, middleware, and databases.
Thankfully, even IBM does not seem to be of two minds about this, as