Timothy Prickett Morgan
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Power Systems Sales Return To Growth
April 27, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIt has been a long decline as the Unix and proprietary systems market succumbed to the double whammies of server virtualization and Moore’s Law increases in performance and decreases in price/performance, but it looks like IBM‘s Power Systems business may have found a new floor on which it can build some growth. That is a lot better than the overall IBM business can say, which has been slipping quarter by quarter, for years now and which did it again in the first quarter of 2015.
In the quarter ended in March, IBM booked $19.5 billion in revenues, down 11.9
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The Remaining Power8 Systems Loom
April 27, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe rumors have started going around that IBM is getting ready to launch the remaining members of the Power8 family of Power Systems machines. We had been anticipating that these machines might come out in concert with the COMMON user conference in Anaheim, California, this week or perhaps at the IBM Edge2015 conference to be hosted in May in Las Vegas. We still do not know for sure when the expected midrange and high-end Power8 machines are coming, but they are not launching at COMMON as far as our sources know.
Last fall, when the Power E870 and half of
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Ruby And DSLs And Blocks
April 21, 2015 Aaron Bartell
… Read moreWhen I started with Ruby I was immediately drawn in by its syntax–simple, elegant, and easy to peruse. At the time I didn’t know this was an intentional mantra of the language put in place by Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, Ruby’s creator. Matz said that he was “trying to make Ruby natural, not simple,” in a way that mirrors life. Further, Matz stated “Ruby is simple in appearance, but is very complex inside, just like our human body.” Let’s take this out of metaphor-land and into tangible code by introducing the DSL, or Domain Specific Language, aspect of Ruby.
First, what
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Joining On Ranges
April 21, 2015 Ted Holt
… Read morePeople are ingenious. Where there’s a need, they find a way. Unfortunately, some of the ways they find don’t jibe well with relational databases, which makes my work life messy. Fortunately, I know a few ways to clean it up, and here’s one of them.
Suppose you work for a company that sells office supplies. One day someone walks into your office and asks for a report of sales of boxes. “Sure thing!” you reply. “How do I know that an item is a box?”
“Easy,” he replies. “The item number begins with 134.”
Easy, indeed.
select ItemNumber, Description from
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An SQL Pivot Procedure
April 21, 2015 Paul Tuohy
… Read moreThe basic concept of a pivot is that row values are transformed into column values. I have often wished that DB2 had a pivot procedure. But until that day arrives I will have to make do with a workaround that you might find useful too.
The workaround is in the form of a stored procedure that can be used to pivot any column in any table. Before getting to the stored procedure, let’s look at a simple pivot example.
These examples are using the SALES table in the DB2 sample database. To create the DB2 sample database on your system,
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Observations From Oracle Collaborate 2015
April 20, 2015 Richard Schoen
… Read moreEach year the three largest Oracle user groups combine to host a user group event called Collaborate. With more than 1,200 educational sessions, you can see there’s a lot going on. Cloud and mobile strategy implementation were highlighted, as was the increasing impact of big data and analytics.
To a large degree, the conversations I had at this event stemmed from the software and services my company offers–HelpSystems was an exhibitor in the expo area–but this event provided a view into a large group of IBM midrange users who are similar to, but also different from, the attendees at
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Big Blue Provides Extended Support For IBM i 6.1
April 20, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreOperating systems do not last forever, but they can and do go on for a long, long time in the corporate datacenter–at least the way operating systems, databases, and applications are configured in monolithic fashion these days. In other realms of corporate computing, companies are thinking about moving to lightweight software containers that wrap around microservices and heavier pieces of code, allowing for the operating system underneath the container to be updated without messing with the system and application code running in the container.
But most of us don’t live in that world and we are wrestling with monoliths and
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Reader Feedback On Crazy Idea #483: A Leveraged Buyout Of IBM i
April 13, 2015 Hey, TPM
… Read moreWe’ve been sitting at least in the same church, if not in the same pew. Terrific article on the sellout of IBM i to private equity. I would make a couple of observations:
- While it seems remarkably obvious, there is real information in the sentence “of course you know that private equity is only buying you with your own money” as spoken by one of my friends in the business who did sell out to PE, successfully.
- If there is a deal to be struck, it seems to me you are in a wonderful position to broker the deal, given
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IBM Offers Deep Discounts On Power-Linux Down Under
April 13, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIBM wants to sell a lot of Power8 iron running the Linux operating system Down Under, and it wants to do it fast. Like before the end of the second quarter, which comes to a close in June. To that end, IBM New Zealand and IBM Australia have kicked out some pretty steeply discounted iron that is sure to get the attention of prospective buyers–maybe even those who might otherwise opt for Linux on X86 machinery.
Under the deal announced in Australia last week in announcement letter ZA2Z5260A, IBM is giving discounts on eight different configurations of the Power
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IBM i Toolkit for Ruby, iit For Short
April 7, 2015 Aaron Bartell
… Read moreWhat if I told you that the best developers in the world are available to work on your next project? What if I told you that they will work for free? Well, they are and they will. In the following paragraphs, I tell you why and how.
The best developers in the world will help you with your projects, for free, because of the magic of open source. Open source efforts have to rank right up there on the list of abnormalities of the human race. Why? Because so much is given away at high cost (time, which in turn