• IBM Patches Another BIND Flaw In IBM i

  March 28, 2018 Alex Woodie

  A serious flaw has been discovered in the BIND networking service that could be used to launch a denial of service attack against impacted servers, including IBM i. IBM patched the flaw in every version of the OS from IBM i 6.1 to 7.3 with a program temporary fix (PTF) made available earlier this month. IBM also patched a serious flaw in WebSphere that could let information leak out.

  According to the IBM security bulletin issued March 12, the ISC BIND flaw known as CVE-2017-3145 has the potential to allow a remote attacker to crash a vulnerable server by sending …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, March 28

  March 28, 2018 Dan Burger

  The Monitor doesn’t often include videos in its “Top Stories From Outside The Jungle” section, but exceptions are made when videos are exceptional. This one, from the recent RPG & DB2 Summit, is in the category of balancing work and fun.

  Last week, IBM hosted a conference it called “Think.” As you might expect, Watson was in the spotlight during many of the keynote addresses and sessions. Some of the reporters liked what they saw, and some were less than impressed. Also in Monitor this week are articles touting the benefit of agile development and warning of …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 20, Number 12

  March 28, 2018 Doug Bidwell

  After the last couple months of announcements and Spectre/Meltdown (SM) mayhem, IBM is catching up on fixes. This week we have new HIPERs, Security, BRMS, and Hardware groups this week.

  Speaking of Spectre and Meltdown, there is no new news or updates, but IBM has finally merged the SM PTFs into the normal “Group” methodology we work with every week. So, to get current on SM for your appropriate release apply the below levels (or higher):

  	7.1 Groups	7.2 Groups	7.3 Groups
  Tech Refresh	N/A	SF99717-008	SF99727-004
  Security	SF99708-079	SF99718-059	SF99728-024
  HIPER	SF99709-217	SF99719-116	SF99729-053

  March 24, 2018: Volume …

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• The Road Ahead For Power Is Paved With Bandwidth

  March 26, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The gap between what most IBM i customers need from Power Systems hardware – particularly when it comes to compute capacity – and what Big Blue can deliver has been widening since about the Power7 generation back in 2010. But, thanks in large measure to the slow down in Moore’s Law advances in chip manufacturing processes, the gap is going to start closing. Not so much because IBM wants it to, but rather because of the limits of physics.

  And, given that the IBM i platform is a database platform that mainly does transaction processing and analytics, IBM’s shift away …

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• Insurer Chooses IBM i Database Re-Engineering Over Migration

  March 26, 2018 Dan Burger

  How do you want your database designed for the future and what problems have you created in the past that need to be fixed before you can think about the future? Old databases, originally designed for a business environment that has changed and continues to change, are not compatible. You may not be feeling any pain today and you may have no plans to change your business/IT alignment in the future, but much of the technology-driven business world is changing, which at some point will leave you alone on an island with a boat but no motor and no paddle. …

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• Guru: More Date And Time Conversions Using SQL

  March 26, 2018 Ted Holt

  Since many, if not most, IBM i shops store dates and times in numeric and character fields, it behooves those of us who program those systems to understand all available date- and time-conversion tools. A conversation with a fellow attendee of the recent RPG & DB2 Summit made me realize that I had not written about certain SQL conversion methods.

  IBM i programmers need to convert date, time, and timestamp data from one format to another for at least two reasons. First, we can’t do date and time arithmetic with numeric and character fields. Second, the people whom we serve …

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• TEMBO Bolsters Database Modernization Kit

  March 26, 2018 Alex Woodie

  TEMBO Technology Lab is shipping a new release of its software designed to help IBM i shops modernize their databases for the SQL age. The South African company made mostly minor tweaks to its flagship product, dubbed AO Foundation, which should position the product to do more down the road.

  Since it entered the IBM i discussion in 2012, TEMBO has been building database modernization tools and evangelizing the benefits of the SQL Query Engine (SQE) as the modern, up-to-date database engine that IBM i shops should strive to use, as opposed to the older CQE engine that used DDS …

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• IBM Will Change WebSphere To Work In A Cloudy World

  March 26, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you had to pick one product that put IBM back on the map in software, it would have to be the WebSphere Application Server that was wrapped around the Apache Web server for the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan. That was back when Big Blue was the technology sponsor for the Olympics, and it used the summer and winter events, each held every four years and out of phase by two years, as a showcase for new technologies. Two years is a Moore’s Law gap, so it worked out nicely.

  WebSphere was the pet project of Tom Rosamilia, …

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• Reassessing IBM i Value: Worthless Iron or Legacy Goldmine?

  March 21, 2018 Alex Woodie

  In the minds of modern-day technologists, the IBM i server is relegated to the scrap bin of history, looked down upon as a vestigial organ of technology’s past with no place in the distributed future, where workloads run effortlessly on clouds and data flows seamlessly everywhere. That outlook gives the platform’s present value a low mark, but considering the recent influx of capital into IBM i ecosystem, one might want to reassess.

  Trying to assess the value of something is not an easy thing to do. When looking at the worth of the entire IBM i ecosystem, or even just …

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• A Closer Look At Enhancements To Integrated Web Services

  March 21, 2018 Dan Burger

  Technology Refresh 8 for IBM i 7.2 and TR4 for IBM i 7.3 became available last week. One of the enhancements in this TR pertains to the Integrated Web Services (IWS), which Business Architect for IBM i Application Development Tim Rowe calls IWS “one of our most widely used pieces of software from an integrated perspective.”

  Web services provide the capability to expose the database to outside developers via APIs and Web services. Although that thought brings a shiver down the spine of many developers who learned the proprietary ways of the AS/400, multi-platform integration is the modern development path. …

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