Timothy Prickett Morgan
-
Faking Create Or Replace Table
January 20, 2015 Ted Holt
… Read moreThe new CREATE OR REPLACE feature of SQL has been most helpful to me. It works for aliases, functions, masks, permissions, procedures, sequences, triggers, variables and views. It would be nice if it worked for tables, especially when I’m developing a new application. Here’s a workaround.
The trick is to use a dynamic compound statement. If you’re not familiar with these, I recommend you read Michael Sansoterra’s excellent article on that subject.
One of the things that dynamic compound statements let you do is include conditional logic, which is what we need. We need a way to drop a table
-
Strengthening Dollar Curtails Global IT Spending Growth
January 19, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreThe new year is well under way and all eyes are already turning toward the end of 2015 to try to guess how much the IT market will grow. The good news is that the consensus seems to be that, in the aggregate, IT spending around the world and across all kinds of devices and services will be up this year compared to 2014. The less-than-good news–but still not bad news–is that the U.S. dollar is getting stronger and that actually cuts global IT spending projections.
The prognosticators at Gartner shaved their predictions for IT spending growth throughout 2014 as
-
Power Systems Inspire New z13 Mainframe
January 19, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreBack in the old days, the mainframe and midrange divisions of IBM rivalled each other almost as much as they took on competition from outside the walls of Big Blue. But since the mid-1990s, when the company first started converging its system lines and made sure they could all run Java and its application server, the different system units of IBM have been collaborating and converging. Now, after selling off its System x division to Lenovo Group last fall, IBM is down to two system divisions within a single IBM Systems group.
The first machine to come out of the
-
IBM i Wish List For 2015
January 19, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreIt is the beginning of a new year, and this is the appropriate time to ponder the things we would like to see happen in the IBM i community over the coming year. As I have said many times, the only way you ever get anything in this world is to ask for it, so I took a few moments to come up with a list of things that I would like to see IBM do in the coming year to help support and extend the IBM i community. Please let us know what you would like to see happen
-
OpenPower Builds Momentum With New Members, Summit
January 12, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreJust as last year was ending and The Four Hundred went on hiatus for the holidays, the OpenPower Foundation that IBM established a year ago added a bunch of new members and also announced that it would be hosting its first summit for system builders, application developers, and other parties that are interested in creating wares based on the Power architecture.
While the OpenPower Consortium was created in August 2013 by IBM, Google, Nvidia, Tyan, and Mellanox Technologies, the more formal OpenPower Foundation that governs the effort to open source elements of the Power architecture to
-
IBM Reorganizes To Reflect Its New Business Machine
January 12, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read moreBig Blue did a lot of changing last year, and CEO Ginni Rometty started off this year by making some organizational and personnel changes that reflect the new shape of its company and the opportunities that it sees ahead of it in the global economy that is also undergoing wrenching change. Information technology and the economy have been changing each other for so long that it is hard to say what is cause and what is effect, but what can be said is that IBM has spent more than 10 decades adapting to such changes.
In a memo to IBM
-
Admin Alert: What Should an IBM i Administrator Do, Part 2
December 17, 2014 Joe Hertvik
… Read moreLast week, I discussed why shops still need IBM i administrators and started describing a checklist of tasks that are well-suited for less experienced administrators. My checklist showcased duties that can easily be turned over to lower level administrators, leaving more experienced people free to complete projects that benefit your organization. Today, I’ll complete describing the IBM i administrator checklist.
The Checklist Continued
As discussed last week, here’s a starter list of duties that can easily be turned over to an IBM i system administrator.
- IBM i user provisioning
- Auditing the system
- Software setups and on-going software database maintenance
- Backup
-
In Praise Of One-Off Tools
December 17, 2014 Ted Holt
… Read moreThis is the last issue of Four Hundred Guru for 2014, and in the last issue of a year I try to write about something unusual, something different from the routine stuff we usually run in this august publication. I worked on several interesting projects in 2014, but the one I want to talk about today will seem really retrograde to you. I wrote a bunch of System/36 RPG II programs. How I wrote them is the real story.
In early 2014, a friend of mine emailed a request. A client of his, who still runs an S/36, was going
-
End of Year Feedback
December 17, 2014 Ted Holt
… Read moreIt’s been a wonderful year, in spite of all the difficulties, problems, and vicissitudes of life that I would rather not have faced. I appreciate all the email that you’ve sent in response to the articles we published. To know that we’ve done something to make someone’s life easier and better gives me great satisfaction. I’d like to share some of your comments with your fellow Four Hundred Guru readers. May you enjoy the holidays, and may 2015 be your best year ever.
Hey, Ted:
I just read Use Wireshark To Diagnose IBM i Communications Problems. You can bypass
-
IBM Pulls The Plug On Old Peripherals
December 8, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan
… Read morePeripherals change with blazing speed in the IT market, and the Power Systems line, as a collection of various components, is no different from other systems out there. IBM can’t keep all components in supply forever, and it has to move to newer components to stay competitive. And thus a bunch of devices for the Power Systems line are being sunsetted in favor of newer kit.
In announcement letter 914-229, IBM is replacing its first generation of 1.8-inch, 387 GB SSDs with the second generation. Both are based on so-called enterprise multi-level cell (eMLC) flash technology, and IBM has