Timothy Prickett Morgan
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A Fastpath To Open A Specific Member In RSE
April 7, 2015 Susan Gantner
… Read moreOne of the first tips I ever wrote for Four Hundred Guru was about keyboard shortcuts for RSE. It was written so long ago, I was talking about WDSC. None of the Rational variants of the product name had come to be at that time. It even predates my downloadable cheat sheet for My Favorite Keyboard Shortcuts for RSE. As you can see if you look at the cheat sheet, I’ve added a lot more favorites since the original article.
The shortcuts in those original tips still work with the recent Rational versions of RSE with one exception.
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Crazy Idea #483: A Leveraged Buyout Of IBM i
April 6, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreSometimes the crazy ideas come from us, sometimes they come from you. Sometimes we are all pondering the possibilities at the same time and it seems like an idea is almost a meme, spreading like a virus, hopping from brain to brain, or as I sometimes suspect might be possible, vibrating in the cosmic ether for others to reflect on if they can only hear the image. Whatever scenario this one is, a bunch of you have reached out and asked me to write about the possibilities of a leveraged buyout of the IBM i business. And so, here we
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Enough With The Huge Performance Increases Already, IBM i Pros Cry
April 1, 2015 Swift
… Read moreIBM i shops are up in arms this week over the huge performance increases that IBM is seeking to foist upon them with the latest Power8 servers. “Eight threads per core and 12 cores per socket? Really IBM?” said clearly exasperated programmer/analyst Jack D. Sparrow. “I mean, what on earth am I going to do with all that raw, unbridled processing power?”
Sparrow is not alone. In fact, a growing number of IBM i professionals are beginning to vocalize concerns about IBM and its sinister plan to equip every customer with a ridiculous amount of computing horsepower that will
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RubyGems Are The Foundation Of Success
March 31, 2015 Aaron Bartell
… Read moreIn my previous article, I discussed a RubyGem named xmlservice but didn’t really dive into what Gems are, why they exist, and how we can use them to save a tremendous amount of time. That’s what this article is about. But before we dive into geekdom, it is worth digressing into a perspective I’ve gained by observing the top open-source-language camps.
I often get asked “Why Ruby? Isn’t XYZ language more popular?” Usually the XYZ language is PHP or Java, as I think it is safe to say PHP is the most popular web language out there and Java
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Dynamic Lists In Static SQL Queries
March 31, 2015 Ted Holt
… Read moreHey, Ted:
We have an SQL query that can take from one to 13 two-byte codes that become part of an IN clause for row selection. We have no idea which codes they will need to see beforehand; it’s an interactive thing. We are using dynamic SQL. I would like to find a static solution. Any suggestions?
–Harold
Sure, Harold. I do this sort of thing from time to time, and I use static SQL to do it.
Let’s say those two-byte codes are state abbreviations, like the state abbreviations we use in the USA. You probably have a form
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Reader Feedback On What’s Up In The IBM i Marketplace . . . Don’t Miss the IBM i Marketplace Webcast . . . COMMON Is Coming, Linux and VIOS Get Top Billing
March 23, 2015 Hey, Dan
… Read moreReader Feedback On What’s Up In The IBM i Marketplace
Hey, Dan:
Your article on the HelpSystems survey of IBM i shops states: “For any IBM i advocate, this survey brings good news. By a wide margin, it demonstrates that organizations have no imminent plans to leave the platform. Nine out of ten are staying put. “This seems to me to be a marketing spin by HelpSystems.
The 89 percent of shops that “have no imminent plans to leave the platform” includes 23.8 percent that are talking about leaving the IBM i platform, and 11 percent that are not sure
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OpenPower Could Take IBM i To Hyperscale And Beyond
March 23, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreYears ago, back when the IBM i platform was called the iSeries and IBM had just caught the Linux bug pretty bad, many of us had the idea that IBM should open up the OS/400 operating system and let it be driven more directly by a community of end users. The idea was to emulate the open source community that had fostered the maturity of the Linux kernel and the many thousands of other projects that make their way into a Linux distribution. As it turns out, Big Blue is starting out with opening up the hardware and from the
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A Ruby And RPG Conversation
March 17, 2015 Aaron Bartell
… Read more“Due diligence” and “risk assessment” are phrases that should be running through your head anytime technology decisions are being made where new tooling or ideas are being put into production. The same is true when considering whether the Ruby language has a place in your shop. After all, it is a significant change in direction when introducing a new language to your technology stack.
What many people don’t know is the adoption of Ruby (and the Rails web framework) can be done in incremental fashion if that is what works best for you. What I mean by that is not
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SQL Joins With Tree Structures: An Oracular Point Of View
March 17, 2015 Ted Holt
… Read moreTree structures are a part of life, especially in the world of manufacturing, where I make my living, so we may as well learn to deal with them. Today I return to this topic, featuring another tool that you can use to tackle the traversal of trees.
In IBM 7.1, IBM added support for a tree-traversal syntax that Oracle invented ages ago. This syntax centers on two clauses of the select statement: START WITH and CONNECT BY.
I’ll illustrate with a few simple queries. First, we need a tree structure to play with. Here are some simple bills of materials.
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Death To Decimal Data Errors!
March 17, 2015 Jon Paris
… Read moreNote: The code accompanying this article is available for download here.
We have all encountered decimal data errors at some time or another. The biggest difficulty they present is that, by the time they have been detected, no recovery is possible. Or to be more precise, no practical recovery is possible. In my previous tip, I mentioned that one of the benefits of data structure I/O is that you can avoid decimal data errors. In this tip I’m going to show you how and why that works.
The code package associated with this tip contains three test programs