• The Tipping Point For Power9

  December 4, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The server market is booming as 2017 comes to a close, and IBM is looking to try to catch the tailwind and lift its Power Systems business from the doldrums and get it rising again on the IBM i, AIX, and Linux fronts. The word on the street is that the first commercial Power9 machines, the ones aimed at HPC and AI workloads, will ship sometime before the end of the year, with a fairly quick ramp of Power9 systems for more generic workloads.

  It can’t come a moment too soon, and while we wish IBM had started shipping Power9 …

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• Food Company Goes All In With WebFocus BI

  November 29, 2017 Alex Woodie

  Measuring the return on investment (ROI) of business intelligence software is a notoriously difficult thing to do. But when it comes to Lipari Foods and its implementation of Information Builders’ BI suite, it’s safe to say that its employees’ relationship to data has changed in a profound and meaningful way.

  Lipari Foods is a midsize company headquartered in Warren, Michigan, that distributes food to 5,000 customers in 18 Midwestern states, a range that extends from Minnesota to Pennsylvania. Thanks to the surge in popularity of specialty foods, such as gluten-free and halal, the privately owned distributor has grown quickly, and …

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• Mainframe And IBM i Share App Dev Testing Tool

  November 29, 2017 Dan Burger

  The integration of disparate IT systems is on the priority list for many companies aggravated by the duplication of effort and the cost tooling for each development environment. It’s fueled the rise of DevOps and the big picture view emphasizing speed and collaboration. For IT environments that share mainframe and IBM i platforms, we have uncovered software that allows applications written in COBOL, PL/I, EGL, RPG and Assembler to share a single tool for testing programs.

  The tool is called XaTester and it’s available through IBM and the company, Xact Consulting, that created it. Xact Consulting is an international …

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• Fiserv Banks On FlashSystem For Speedup

  November 29, 2017 Alex Woodie

  There are lots of ways to make your transaction and analytic workloads move a little faster: optimize the database, add memory, tweak some code. But if you want to make them go a lot faster, pair them with a bank of high-speed solid state drives. That’s what IBM i banking software provider Fiserv did recently with IBM’s FlashSystem storage gear.

  According to an IBM Solution Brief, the Brookfield, Wisconsin, software vendor went to IBM’s Rochester, Minnesota, lab in late 2015 to benchmark a FlashSystem storage array for a large commercial bank that’s a user of Signature, Fiserv‘s IBM …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, November 29

  November 29, 2017 Dan Burger

  The modernization of RPG applications begins with modern RPG development skills. There are several ways to upgrade RPG skills or introduce developers to RPG for the first time. One of them is to connect with Jim Buck. He has 15 years of teaching RPG at the collegiate level, co-authored an RPG textbook, and anchored the team that established the RPG certification test.

  This week in Monitor, we have the transcript of Paul Tuohy’s interview with Buck, along with articles on the rise container-style application development, dealing with digital transformation disruption, and both sides of the looming FCC decision on net …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 19, Numbers 45 And 46

  November 28, 2017 Doug Bidwell

  There has not been much happening in the past several weeks in IBM i PTF Land, but here is a roundup of the little bit that that did happen.

  In the IBM i PTF Guide Number 45, we have new groups for the HTTP Server and Open Source. If you haven’t checked out the open source licensed programs yet, you can find it at this link.

  In Number 46 of the IBM i PTF Guide, there were Recommended Fixes for V7R3, V7R2, and V7R1. There were also patches for the Cryptographic Services/DCM and Cryptographic Co-processor for Power Systems, …

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• Counting The Cost

  November 27, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We are strong believers in being thorough with both the technical and economic analysis of platforms. In the absence of a lot of performance and pricing information on Power Systems iron, we are always looking for ways to help IBM i shops try to figure out what to do when they are thinking about upgrading a machine or just tossing out the old one and buying a new one.

  IBM isn’t shipping Power9-based machines that can support IBM i as yet, and it is not expected to do so until early next year. But in the meantime, Big Blue wants …

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• The Top iOS Apps For IBM i

  November 27, 2017 Alex Woodie

  Despite sharing a similar name with Apple products, IBM i isn’t mobile. You can’t run IBM i on your smartphone or tablet, let alone on your watch or whatever IoT-connected gadget people need now. But that doesn’t mean developers haven’t written a bunch of mobile apps that connect to IBM i. Here are the top 15 iOS apps for IBM i.

  Being a developer of propriety hardware and software, Apple won’t share much about, well, just about anything. In fact, the super secretive company from Cupertino, Calif., doesn’t even provide a way to browse the catalog of iOS apps on …

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• Guru: Using SELECT * With Cursors

  November 27, 2017 Ted Holt

  From time to time someone brings to my attention the use of SELECT * with SQL cursors in RPG programs. Specifically, is that a good idea or a bad idea? I have learned that the answer to that question is “It depends.” Using SELECT * in a cursor declaration may or may not get you into trouble.

  To set the stage, let’s begin with a simple example — an RPG program that reads one table (physical file) and prints each row (record). Even though most programs use data from more than one table, programs that read only one table are …

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• Data Analytics And Business Intelligence: Too Little, Too Much, Too Late?

  November 27, 2017 Dan Burger

  There’s no slowing down the amount of data and the number of data sources. Drinking from that informational firehose is a success for a few, an in-progress experiment for others, and an incentive to find some other way to quench analytical thirst for many. Improving the data mining, to use a term that was popular before the big data firehose was turned on, of structured data continues to be a useful endeavor for many IBM i shops. And, by the way, that doesn’t make them dinosaurs stumbling down the path of extinction, unless you get your news from press releases. …

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