• Happy Holidays From IT Jungle!

  December 23, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The years are always long ones, and that is a virtue, not a curse. Having work and purpose, and being part of a community, is not just a good thing, but the thing. It can be easy to forget that sometimes, when we are busy and caught up in our busy-ness.

  But now is the time of year when the good folks at IT Jungle, for which I have had the great honor to be associated with for many decades now, take a break and spend time with family and friends and let the words follow where they will …

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• 2017: An IBM i Year In Review

  December 13, 2017 Alex Woodie

  It’s mid-December, which means it’s time to look back upon 2017 and reminisce on the biggest stories of the year for IBM i and the overall midrange community. From a pair of Technology Refreshes and the scheduled demise of IBM i 7.1 to acquisitions and security breaches, there was a lot to take in.

  It all started off innocently enough in…

  January

  IBM has had a good run of not changing the name of the platform. In fact, it hadn’t changed the name since 2008, giving it a line of uninterrupted starts that even Giants quarterback Eli Manning could appreciate. …

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• UCG Technologies Takes Off To The Great White North

  December 13, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  For those of you who have never tried to build a business and employ people before, it is a hell of a lot harder to do than it may look. But it is an invaluable experience, and a way of life that some people cannot do without. Just ask Jim Kandrac, one of the most vocal and ebullient members of the IBM i community, and he will tell you all about it.

  We had a chat with Kandrac last week just as the company was celebrating its 30th anniversary in business, which is a long time for any IT company …

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• ARCAD Procures Funding To Fuel Expansion

  December 13, 2017 Dan Burger

  The financial incentives instigating investors to back companies that create software and provide services to the IBM i community continue to raise eyebrows and elicit surprise among those unfamiliar with the innovation taking place in the so-called legacy netherworld.

  Another glimpse of this appeared last week when ARCAD Software announced it received a € 2.5 million ($2.95 million in US currency) investment from the European equity firm Alto Invest. ARCAD develops and markets DevOps and modernization solutions for platforms that include IBM i, Unix, Linux, Windows and z/OS. This is the first external funding ARCAD has received during its …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, December 13

  December 13, 2017 Dan Burger

  Finding programmers skilled in open source technologies isn’t difficult. And neither is teaching them modern RPG. A good programmer can be comfortable and productive in multiple environments given the right set of circumstances. Real world examples exist and this article is written by someone who is living it.

  Another example of skills evolution is happening with Db2 for i. The value of a modern database is widely overlooked, but the benefits are numerous. IBM’s Mike Cain explains how database knowledge can pay off. Insights into Power9 and AI applications plus the costs of bad data are also in Monitor this …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 19, Number 49

  December 13, 2017 Doug Bidwell

  There is not much happening this week in IBM i PTF Land, and the holiday season is obviously in nearly full swing. But I was able to glean the following newsworthy items:

  Recommended Fixes – Temporary Disk Space

  Record locking API isn’t cleaning up after itself.

  • V7R3 SI65944
  • V7R2 SI65942
  • V7R1 SI65943

  Recommended Fixes – HMC code Upgrades

  We have added the following link to the “Links” worksheet in the guide – great stuff is here! See http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=nas8N1021840.

  And, finally, happy holidays, and we will see you in the new year….

  As usual, we have included an archive of …

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• The AS/400 Lessons Come Back Around With Power9 Systems

  December 11, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  For many years before I took the job as Systems Editor at The Register and in the years since I left that post, the joke about any new system or device was: “Yes, but can it run Crysis?” Those of us writing stories would bend a few sentences around the idea, particularly with Linux systems, which if you equipped them with the WINE Windows emulator might allow said device to indeed run that first-person shooter game that was popular from 2007 through 2013.

  As we think about the new “Witherspoon” Power9 server that IBM launched last week, we can’t help …

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• Trinity Guard Fills Gap In IBM i Network Security

  December 11, 2017 Alex Woodie

  Trinity Guard, the IBM i security software company founded by the original developers from Pentasafe, this month rolled out TG Secure, a new network security product that addresses a potentially serious gap in exit point coverage that many IBM i shops who use open source software may not be aware of.

  IBM has done a good job of bringing new open source tools, technologies, and applications to the platform. The addition of languages like PHP, Node.js, Ruby, and Python; products like the NGINX Web server, the MySQL/MariaDB databases, and the Git repository; and everything else included in the 5733-OPS open …

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• Guru: Quirky SQL Creations

  December 11, 2017 Ted Holt

  Hey, Ted:

  We are creating a view from a source member using the Run SQL Statements (RUNSQLSTM) command. None of the objects are qualified in the source member. The system always creates the view in the wrong library, no matter how we set the current library. Can you tell me what is happening?

  –William

  William ran up against the quirky behavior of the SQL CREATE VIEW statement. It sure threw me for a loop. I would have thought that the view would be created in the current library. Not so. William found the answer to his question in the IBM …

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Bubbling Over

  December 11, 2017 Hesh Wiener

  The Turks may have started it, shipping tulips to Vienna around 1554, but during the next century the Dutch finished it. Hollanders dominated a booming market in cultivated tulips and a bumper crop of financial instruments based on the trade. Then, in 1637, tulip prices collapsed, breaking speculators and triggering a financial tsunami. With FANG stocks – Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google – and other tech shares sky high, worriers say a comparable collapse is imminent. Now there’s even a movie, Tulip Fever, built around the old story. Will tech companies get whacked? Will IBM be among them? …

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