• Pride In Advancing The IBM i Community

  July 10, 2017 Dan Burger

  The IBM i community is a global community. We sometimes forget that as we limit our view to the horizon as seen from our own IT departments. Curiosity may have killed the cat, but the smart cats will tell you it’s far more likely to simply kill ignorance. The power of ideas should not be underestimated. And access to ideas is the reason the IBM i community benefits from events like the recent COMMON Europe Congress (CEC). The education and networking opportunities are what inspires people to participate, says Ranga Deshpande, president of COMMON Europe. “There’s pride in advancing the …

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• Tomorrowland: Optimism, Risk, and Preparation For IBM i App Dev

  June 28, 2017 Dan Burger

  The rules of application development were never carved in stone. They’ve always been subject to change, improvements, enhancements and even replacements. Uncertainty and risk – do you stay or do you go – torture the brains of long-range planners who recognize the importance of preparation, but are caught in the whirlpool of innovation and hyperbole. Predicting future skills and tools is not an exact science. But with a high degree of certainty, we do know that sitting on your hands is no way to prepare for the future.

  I asked a group of skillful IBM i application development monitors and …

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• Database Modernization Network Grows for TEMBO

  June 28, 2017 Alex Woodie

  A growing network of business partners is helping TEMBO Technology Lab spread the word about the benefits of database modernization to IBM i shops in North America. It’s also helping to lower the barrier to of entry for IBM i clients to get started.

  If you ask a group of IBM i professionals what application modernization means, you’ll likely hear a lot of different answers: the importance of avoiding “legacy” technologies, why free form RPG is great, the value of responsive design, and the importance of having a “mobile first” approach.

  To TEMBO founder Marinus van Sandwyk, these answers aren’t …

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• Improving Customer Engagement on IBM i

  June 28, 2017 Alex Woodie

  A new survey points to a growing desire among IBM i shops to offer more customer engagement channels to their customers. However, the cost of implementing these changes and a lack of technical skills present considerable barriers, according to SoftLanding Systems, which conducted the poll.

  IT resources are a limited asset at most organizations. They must choose carefully when and where to deploy these resources for maximum affect. At the same time, there is usually a long list of “wants” from various lines of business, and perhaps a shorter list of more critical “needs.” It’s up to the CIO and …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, June 28

  June 28, 2017 Dan Burger

  Jack Woehr duly notes IBM i open source proponents who are porting useful, popular open source to the i platform. But he also points to another path, one that he describes as object-disoriented. He can call it anything he wants, because he’s the one who blazed the trail. Woehr’s trail is generally a Java interpreter and specifically an interpretive form of JTOpen that makes it easier to encapsulate legacy IBM i as-is and offload the Web dev to the people who do Web dev best.

  The quality of the products being produced in the open source community and the inclusiveness …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 19, Number 25

  June 28, 2017 Doug Bidwell

  Welcome to your own personal IBM i Patch Wednesday and the IBM i PTF Guide that helps you figure out what patches to apply to your releases so you can keep current and therefore keep optimal in terms of performance, stability, and security.

  In this week’s rendition, we see that the High Availability Group has some new fixes for us. I am a week or two late in reporting them for IBM i 7.3 and IBM i 7.2, but they are here and available for us. The newest fixes allow for additional logging for better error determination in special resynch …

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• DB2 For i Support Now Offered by Rimini Street

  June 26, 2017 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops now have another option for obtaining technical support and maintenance services in support their DB2 for i environment: Rimini Street. And in some cases, owing to the uniquely integrated nature of this platform, the vendor will even provide support for the IBM i operating system as well.

  Earlier this month, the Las Vegas, Nevada, company announced that it’s now offering third-party support services for all three versions of IBM‘s DB2 database – DB2 for i, DB2 for z/OS, and DB2 for Linux, Unix, and Windows (a.k.a. “Cousin LUWy”), in addition to the SQL Server database from …

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• Rocketing Ahead With An API Engine

  June 26, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The history of computing is governed by a plethora of opposing forces, with the polar opposites interweaving and interleaving to create more general trends that undulate and cause the waves we ride on top of or get swamped by. There is a tendency toward abstraction and the desire to get closer to the iron to wring the absolute most performance out of a specific system, for instance. Humans don’t think in binary or assembler – well most humans don’t but there are always a few genius weirdos – so the speed of execution is sacrificed for the speed of the …

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• Guru: Storing Images In An SQL Table, Part 1

  June 26, 2017 Mike Larsen

  In the first part of this series, we’ll look at how we can store images (or other media) in an SQL table on the IBM i. To accomplish this goal, we’ll write an RPG program that reads a table that has the name and location of the images from a folder in the IFS, and writes those images to a table.

  The images will be stored in a column that is defined as a BLOB data type. ‘BLOB’ stands for ‘Binary Large Object’, and is a collection of binary data that is stored as a single entity in a database. …

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• IT Budgets Partly Sunny Thanks To The Cloud

  June 26, 2017 Dan Burger

  Lowering costs is not the only thing to scrutinize when noodling the idea of moving selected IT workloads to the cloud. But people do tend to focus on that and wonder if the cloud saves money or if the costs just get moved around like the pea under the shell in the old carnival game.

  Computer Economics, in its latest report on IT spending, presents data that credits cloud for the continued success of do-more-with-less strategies in IT departments of all shapes and sizes. The report backs that up by unearthing a five-year pattern of IT spending reductions figured …

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