• Government Mainframes Versus DOGE: Showdown At The COBOL Corral

  March 17, 2025 Alex Woodie

  Elon Musk is a force of nature, slashing the federal payroll through the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). But the government’s IBM mainframes are immovable objects in their own rights, lasting the test of time. If Musk and DOGE are serious about reforming how the government does business, the government’s legacy systems will pose a serious challenge.

  As the head of DOGE, Musk has ruffled plenty of feathers with his comments and his actions, including firing federal employees en masse and wielding a large “chainsaw for bureaucracy” given to him by Argentine President Javier Milei, an ally of President Donald …

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• RISE For SAP Could Be A Boon For IBM’s PowerVS Cloud

  March 17, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  German application giant System Analyse Programmentwicklung, better known as SAP, has spent more than five decades to deliver five major versions of application software to help companies run themselves. They are R/1 in 1977, R/2 in 1981, R/3 in 1992, mySAP.com (which became Business Suite) in 1999, SAP HANA in 2011 with its S/4HANA application suite in 2015. And today, the company has over 400,000 customers.

  As is well known, SAP wants to create an application system, which is a phrase that resonates with the OS/400 and IBM i faithful. SAP was founded by five ex-IBMers from Germany and started …

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• Guru: Creating An RPG Stored Procedure That Returns A Result Set

  March 17, 2025 Mike Larsen

  In the previous article, I showed how to create an RPG stored procedure that uses parameters. In this article, I’m going to show how to create an RPG stored procedure that returns a result set, as we would likely encounter this scenario more frequently. The data used in this example comes from the Department table from IBM’s Sample database.

  I created an RPG program (Figure 1) that selects all rows from the Departments table. I didn’t add any selection criteria as I know there aren’t many rows in the table, but you may want to limit the number of rows …

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• Shield Adds Task Automation To Message Monitoring Tool

  March 17, 2025 Alex Woodie

  Automating the monitoring of IBM i messages was just the start for Shield Advanced Solutions and its AAG offering. This month, the company announced that the Nagios-based tool has been bolstered with support for Ansible, which gives it the capability to automatically respond and take actions based on certain IBM i messages.

  Shield Advanced Solutions launched AAG, which stands for At-A-Glance, back in 2023 as a way to help its customers monitor high availably setups. Shield President Chris Hird was aghast that some IBM i shops were leaving mirrored pairs under monitored, which reduced the odds the systems would be …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 27, Number 11

  March 17, 2025 Doug Bidwell

  Last week was a busy week for PTF patches, but not for security vulnerabilities. And this week is even quieter, but there are new defective PTF reports this week that you need to keep an eye on, as is usually the case in most weeks.

  Here is the rundown of PTF Groups by IBM i release level since we last published:

  PTF Groups 7.5:

  • None

  PTF Groups 7.4:

  • MQ for IBM i – v9.0.0/v9.1.0/v9.2.0/v9.3.0

  PTF Groups 7.3:

  • None

  Tip O’ The Week: We are thinking.

  New (or Updated) links added to the ‘Links’ tab in The Guide this week:

  • None

  …

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• Not April Fools: More Price Increases For Power Systems Coming

  March 10, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM is at it again, raising prices for parts of the Power Systems stack and related hardware and software technologies often used with the platform.

  In announcement letter AD25-0860, which came out on March 3, Big Blue raised prices on various Power Systems and storage products and across various geographic regions.

  Another part of the price change was to rebalance against the U.S. dollar foreign exchange rate. IBM did a similar price harmonization across geographies in November 2011, and then did it again on September 3. In the latest announcement, eighteen different currencies in the Asia/Pacific and EMEA regions …

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• What The Marketplace Study Says About IBM i Migrations And Outlook

  March 10, 2025 Alex Woodie

  One of the values that Fortra’s annual IBM i Marketplace Survey brings to the table is to function as a forward-looking indicator. If something is stirring in the IBM i installed base – say, that a large chunk is looking to mosey off the platform – then it likely will appear in the data. So when we analyze the data from the 2025 report, that’s something worth looking for.

  The good news from the 2025 IBM i Marketplace Survey results is that there’s nothing to indicate any mass migrations are under way. Companies will always come and go on IBM …

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• Guru: AI Pair Programming In RPG With Continue

  March 10, 2025 Gregory Simmons

  In my last article, I shared a brief introduction to the GitHub Copilot extensions. These extensions provide an easy way to get up and running with an AI coding assistant to aid you in your RPG development. Being cloud based, it’s lightweight in terms of system resources, but it does cost a little money per month, per user.

  For this article, I would like to share with you what I have learned about a newer extension for VS Code named Continue. Continue runs locally on your PC, is 100 percent free, and as of this writing, is the leading …

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• Rocket CDC Tool Pushes Data Out Of IBM i

  March 10, 2025 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that need a change data capture (CDC) tool to push Db2 data off the box onto a target system, such as an Apache Kafka stream, may want to check out the new DataEdge product that Rocket Software recently announced.

  In late January, Rocket Software unveiled DataEdge, a new suite that provides a spectrum of data integration, data discovery, and data virtualization capabilities under the specific product names Rocket Data Replicate & Sync, Rocket Data Intelligence, and Rocket Data Virtualization. Some of the components in DataEdge are preexisting, while others – such as the outbound IBM i CDC …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 27, Number 10

  March 10, 2025 Doug Bidwell

  There are new PTF group updates for the current releases of IBM i – that would be 7.3, 7.4, and 7.5 – but not much in the way of the occasional weirdness we see in the software stack or the never-ending stream of security vulnerabilities. Take it while you can get it. . . .

  Here is the rundown of PTF Groups by IBM i release level since we last published:

  PTF Groups 7.5:

  • HIPERs (High Impact/Pervasive)
  • Security
  • IBM MQ for IBM i – v9.2.0/v9.3.0
  • PowerHA Tools for IBM i – Full System FlashCopy (FSFC)
  • PowerHA Tools for IBM i

  …

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