Timothy Prickett Morgan
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IBM Layoffs Not As Dramatic As Rumored
February 9, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIt is the beginning of a new year and this is the traditional time for IBM, which reported its financial results for the fourth quarter a few weeks ago, to do what it calls “workload rebalancing” or initiate “resource actions.” Those are euphemisms for employee layoffs, which have varying effects on IBM i shops. Some years, like last year, the Power Systems business takes some hits, in other years, different parts of Big Blue do.
Last year at this time, IBM set aside $1 billion for layoffs, which affected between 13,000 and 15,000 of its worldwide employee base of
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German Hotel Search Engine Mashes Up Watson And IBM i
February 9, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreHere is the kind of story that you can bet IBM wants to see more of as it tries to peddle its cognitive analytics expertise to customers using traditional transaction processing systems running on what many people call legacy systems.
An intrepid IT consultant based in Kaufering, Germany, named Rainer Ross, who has expertise in Power Systems machinery running the IBM i operating system and its integrated DB2 for i relational database management system, has created a new search engine for locating hotel rooms called myhofi. The hotel search engine is actually providing a new revenue stream for the
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A Peek Inside IBM’s Merchant Power8 Processors
February 2, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreBig Blue may have sold off its IBM Microelectronics chip making division to GlobalFoundries, but it is still in control of the Power8 processor and it is still very much interested in creating and selling merchant versions of the Power8 processors that it has created for its own Power Systems server lineup. A new report released from chip industry watcher The Linley Group has taken a look at these merchant-class Power8 chips and how they fit into the systems market.
Someday, a machine that an IBM i customer buys could end up coming from a third-party vendor, not from
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Knee-Deep In Ruby Waters
January 27, 2015 Aaron Bartell
… Read moreIn Testing The Ruby Waters I introduced you to Ruby and how to use irb (interactive Ruby shell) to easily run and test Ruby code. In this article I expound on that and introduce more features of the Ruby programming language as it relates to an IBM i programmer. In particular, Ruby methods and one form of encapsulation.
Ruby is an object-oriented language; everything in Ruby is an object. But that doesn’t inhibit Ruby from being used in a more procedural approach. Below is a Ruby program named “say_hi.rb” with a method definition of “hi”, and then the invocation of
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The Powerful SQL Upsert
January 27, 2015 Ted Holt
… Read moreAs you well know, a common task in business computing is to update an entity (customer, vendor, purchase order line, etc.) that exists, but add the entity if it doesn’t exist. In RPG this requires two operations–an update and a write–within a conditional statement. In SQL one statement handles the whole shebang. Here’s how it works.
Here’s some RPG III code that illustrates the situation.
FCUSTF UF E K DISK . . . code omitted C CUSKEY KLIST C KFLD COMP C KFLD ACCT C* . . . more code omitted C* HILOEQ C CUSKEY CHAINCUSTREC 99 C* . .
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Everybody Likes Shortcuts! Part 2, Playing With Blocks
January 27, 2015 Susan Gantner
… Read moreIn my last tip on RSE shortcuts, I talked about shortcuts that help you find your way as you navigate through source members. Eventually, you find the place where you need to work with the code. So in this tip, I’ll concentrate on shortcuts to help with that, and specifically working with blocks of code.
First let’s talk about selecting a block of code. There are many ways: You could drag your mouse over the block or hold down the Shift key and use the cursor arrow down key to select the lines for the block. The one I’ve
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Reader Feedback On IBM i Wish List For 2015
January 26, 2015 Hey, TPM
… Read moreFirst, my disclaimer. I have worked my whole life in the S/3X space: 31 years as an IBMer, last 10 working for the (now) IBM i brand and Rochester, then nine years working for IBM Business Partners.
Next, my wish list (biased by the above):
1) I’d like to see graduated pricing for IBM i, regardless of software tier. One of the biggest impediments to sales of new footprints is Initial Purchase Price. P05 licenses of IBM i and its LPPs are very competitive. P10 is expensive and P20 and above are prohibitive. I’d like to see IBM make the
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IBM Wraps Up Change In 2014, Looks Ahead To 2015
January 21, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreAlthough the company might be called International Business Machines, the real drivers, at least in 2015, are set to revolve around data, cloud, and engagement. That was the message from Martin Schroeter, IBM’s chief financial officer, who walked Wall Street analysts through the company’s financial results for the fourth quarter of 2014 after the markets closed on Tuesday. While Power Systems and System z servers and various storage products will be a foundation for IBM’s business, Big Blue will continue to push its software and services in the pursuit of revenue and profit growth.
As is usually the case, Ginni
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Regurgitating Data With DB2 For i Data Change Table References
January 20, 2015 Hey,
… Read moreFour Hundred Guru:
I’ve been reading your SQL articles in hopes of finding a solution to a problem. I need to insert the same data into two tables at the same time in detail form to one table and in summary form to the other. Is such a thing possible?
I have an incoming transaction table that I want to insert into another table. The incoming transaction table has multiple columns and some of those columns are quantities (integer) fields or amount (with a decimal) fields. I want SQL to run an INSERT INTO… SELECT FROM type statement to
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Everybody Likes Shortcuts! Part 1, Navigation
January 20, 2015 Susan Gantner
… Read moreI’ve seen a particularly sharp increase in the use of RDi (or Rational Developer for i) by RPGers this year. I suspect that has a lot to do with the fact that it contains the only editor that supports the new V7 all-free-format version of the RPG language. Even among shops that are not planning to make use of free form D specs right away, this limitation seems to have made people realize that the writing was on the wall and that SEU’s day had come and gone.
One way that I gauge the interest in RDi is in the