• Four Hundred Monitor, July 15

  July 15, 2019 Jenny Thomas

  The IBM i is in a constant battle to defend itself from being regarded as a legacy platform. Still, worries about its future persist and companies continue to look for the latest slick technology to propel them into the future. But a new report from Gartner warns that jumping platforms not only might not be a viable solution, it could leave your organization in a worse situation than where you started. You can get a closer look at and some takeaways from the Gartner report via the Seiden Group at the first link below. Isn’t it about time that we …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Number 28

  July 15, 2019 Doug Bidwell

  A reminder once again: Don’t forget the annual OCEAN technical conference. This is just a reminder that if you are in our neck of the woods in southern California that the OCEAN TechCon19 IBM i Technical Conference – check out CODE LEARN20 – runs from July 25 through 27.

  In this week’s IBM i PTF Guide, there are updates to Backup Recovery Solutions for IBM i 7.2 and IBM i 7.3. Also, IBM’s Pre-Upgrade Validation Tool now supports V7R4! See new link in “Links” section of the Guide.

  New (Updated) Links this week:

  • System: Machine Ineligible Condition
  • ACS:

  …

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• Eradani Bridges The Gap Between Legacy And Open Source

  July 8, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In this publication, legacy is not a dirty word or even remotely pejorative. Rather, “legacy” is just a shorthand way of delineating between applications that encapsulate decades of the evolution of a business and the transactions it processes, and all of the other new stuff that this business is also doing and perhaps coding with newer tools and programming languages.

  A new company, called Eradani, has been founded by some experts in both the IBM i world and the open source world with the express purpose of building a technical bridge so these two different cultures can see a …

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• Skytap Bullish On Its Hourly Billing In New IBM i Cloud

  July 8, 2019 Alex Woodie

  After a successful tech preview, Skytap last month announced that its public cloud for IBM i is now open for business. Customers can rent time on Skytap’s IBM i cloud, starting at $200 per month per vCPU or $.50 per hour per vCPU. While the monthly option will work well for production workloads, it’s the hourly billing option that’s turning heads, especially among IBM i developers looking to adopt agile and DevOps practices.

  Skytap isn’t the only cloud option for IBM i customers. There are numerous private cloud offerings launched over the past few years, largely as IBM business partners, …

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• Guru: One Way To Deal With Two Null Formats

  July 8, 2019 Ted Holt

  Hey, Ted:

  We are building a new system and want to use modern programming and database techniques. I have had quite a time trying to get nulls to act right. It gets confusing fast because RPG handles them differently than the way embedded SQL does. When using SQL for I/O, how do we handle the two null formats?

  — Brian

  There are several ways to go about the “problem” of nulls. Let me give you one simple method, but keep in mind that it’s not the only way.

  First, let’s create a table and put some data into it.

  create 

  …

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• As I See It: Paper Or Plastic

  July 8, 2019 Victor Rozek

  Technology managers often grapple with a thorny employment dilemma: Do they hire for specialization or suppleness; specific or general knowledge; narrow but deep, or broad but shallow. It’s the quandary of expert versus generalist, and it’s like deciding whether you want to buy a hot car with no utility, or a utility vehicle with no hot.

  Some of the ambivalence arises from the fact that both are contextually useful and necessary. A handyman by definition must be a generalist; but you probably don’t want a handyman performing your bypass surgery.

  Yet according to Jerry Useem, things are shifting noticeably in …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Number 26

  July 8, 2019 Doug Bidwell

  All of us at IT Jungle like to support our local user groups, and being from Southern California, the IBM i PTF Guide has a soft spot in its heart for the annual OCEAN technical conference. This is just a reminder that if you are in our neck of the woods, the OCEAN TechCon19 IBM i Technical Conference – check out CODE LEARN20 – runs from July 25 through 27.

  Turning back to the IBM i PTF Guide, there is a new High Availability Group for 7.4, and updates for MQ for IBM i – v7.1.0/v8.0.0/V9.0.0 for IBM i …

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• How Big Blue Stacks Up IBM i On Premises And On Cloud

  June 24, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Here’s the $64,000 question: How much more does a slice of the IBM Cloud running IBM i cost compared to buying an on-premises machine with the same rough amount of capacity and installing IBM i on it and putting it into production? The answer to that question is: That all depends. But in general, as is the case with all infrastructures available on premises and on the cloud, the cloud is always more expensive.

  This is not a surprise if you think about it for a moment. By using cloudy infrastructure, you are offloading the hassle of maintaining hardware and …

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• ARCAD Brings Traditional 5250 Development Into DevOps Fold

  June 24, 2019 Alex Woodie

  IBM i developers who embrace modern DevOps techniques typically also use modern development tools, like RDi. Much of the IBM i world uses IBM’s latest development environment, but many have resisted. Now, thanks to new software from ARCAD Software, IBM i developers who work with older tools like PDM can also partake of the benefits of DevOps.

  Getting older IBM i developers on board with the latest tools and techniques is a big priority for ARCAD Software, according to Alexandre Codinach, vice president of Americas for ARCAD Software, which included the new 5250 development capabilities with the launch of …

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• Guru: When %SCAN Isn’t Sufficient

  June 24, 2019 Ted Holt

  The RPG %SCAN built-in function is wonderful! I can still remember having to look for a string within a string using RPG II on System/36. What an ordeal that was! Yet in some situations %SCAN can’t do all I need it to do. In those cases, I rely on the power of SQL.

  One case where SQL comes in handy is when I need a case-insensitive scan. Instead of RPG’s %SCAN function, I use SQL’s LOCATE and UPPER functions, like this:

  dcl-s  Description  char(48);
  dcl-s  pos          int (10);
  
  exec sql
     set :pos = locate ('HAMMER', upper(:Description));
  

  If Description has the …

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