• What Are Your Application Priorities?

  March 25, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Money is a proxy for intent, but the amount that companies budget for any particular application, whether it is homegrown or bought off the shelf, is not necessarily a good indicator of the value that they will ultimately derive from that investment. Still, every IT budget is a reflection of both necessity and hope. Some things you simply have to do to even be in business, and other things you do to improve the business. Most of the time it works, sometimes it ends up being a sunk cost with very little benefit.

  The analysts at Gartner were kind enough …

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• Assessing IBM i’s Role In Digital Transformation

  March 20, 2019 Alex Woodie

  There comes a time in every application’s life when its owner must take a hard look at its continued viability and ask the tough question: Will the application continue to meet the business’s evolving needs, or should the whole thing be scrapped for something new? These business and technology assessments can be especially tough when the software runs on the IBM i server.

  Many companies these days are looking to modernize their aging IT systems in the hopes of gaining more agility and flexibility. Whether you call it digital transformation or application modernization, the goals are often similar: Simplify the …

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• Midnight Commander Comes To IBM i

  March 20, 2019 Alex Woodie

  IBM i professionals who work extensively with files in the IFS will be happy to hear a new software utility has been ported to the IBM i PASE environment that could save them a bunch of time. The open source software, called Midnight Commander, gives developers and administrators a handy command line experience that can help speed up tasks, especially when giving commands to large number of files stored on remote machines.

  Midnight Commander was originally developed in 1994 as a file utility for UNIX, which was beginning to emerge from software labs to challenge minicomputer platforms of the day, …

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• BMC Touches Clouds with Job Scheduler

  March 20, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Clouds are growing quickly as IT executives look to find more flexibility and cut costs by adopting cloud and software as a service (SaaS) applications. But most enterprises aren’t getting rid of all their on-premise systems, which means somebody needs to connect those cloud and on-premise systems. One of those “somebodies” is BMC Software.

  You might not remember it, but BMC Software still actively supports the IBM i environment with enterprise job scheduler, called CONTROL-M. The Houston, Texas, company has supported the IBM midrange server for years, and continues to do so with the 19th version of CONTROL-M, which the …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, March 20

  March 20, 2019 Jenny Thomas

  Did you know today, March 20, is considered the first day of spring? At least in the Northern Hemisphere it is. Also known as the spring equinox, today the length of the day is nearly equal in all parts of the world. While those of us on the Northern side of the globe start to enjoy longer, sunnier days, we can all enjoy the latest news from in and around our IBM i ecosystem. Be sure to check out our calendar at the bottom section for travel opportunities – a trip to COMMON in Southern California sounds like a great …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Number 11

  March 20, 2019 Doug Bidwell

  Enjoy the quiet while you can, there are no new cumes or groups for any release this week. However, regarding updating QMGTOOLS, here is the command that checks for and pulls down the update if necessary, then installs it:

  QMGTOOLS/CMPVER NOPROMPT(Y)
  

  You might want to think about putting this command into your scheduler for every Sunday morning.

  There are no new defectives this week, but once again here is the most recent defective PTF rundown (The last defective for each release):

  	Defect		Defective	APAR	Fixing
  	Date		PTF			PTF
  	--------	--------	-------	-------
  7.3	03/05/19		MF65608	MA47478	MF65690 (Available!)
  			MF65603
  			MF65584
  			

  …

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• Entry Power S812 Gets A New – But Still Short – Lease On Life

  March 18, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Despite the fact that Moore’s Law increases in performance in CPUs have been slowing for years, for many customers, the growth in the throughput performance of processors as more cores and threads are added to a Power9 chip have outstripped the capacity growth requirements for many IBM i shops. For many of these customers, a single core Power7, Power7+, or even Power8 processor did the trick just fine, and is better suited to their needs than an entry Power9 machine with just one core running IBM i.

  We would argue – and have argued many times – that what IBM …

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• Wanted: Exciting New Publicist For Boring Old Server

  March 18, 2019 Alex Woodie

  You don’t need a marketing guru to tell you the IBM i server has a publicity problem. Outside the cloistered midrange community, nobody knows that it even exists. Even some of the companies that run their businesses on it don’t know it exists. Unicorns and leprechauns, which don’t exist, have a greater mindshare than the IBM i server. And the funny thing is, that’s exactly how it was all designed.

  According to industry analyst Rob Enderle, the IBM i server is a world leader in one computing category: boredom.

  “You put it in, you leave it alone, and it just …

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• Guru: When Playing With SQL

  March 18, 2019 Paul Tuohy

  One of the questions I have been asked a lot at conferences is “How do you figure out x in SQL?” In this article, I will discuss four things I use a lot when playing with SQL in Run SQL Scripts: VALUES, SYSIBM.SYSDUMMY1, global variables, and the system catalog.

  VALUES

  When I am trying to figure out how an SQL function works, my first port of call is the VALUES statement. VALUES derives a result directly from an expression. For example, the following statement:

  values upper('paul');
  

  Would generate the following result set:

  

  You can specify more than one value in …

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• As I See It: The Useless Class

  March 18, 2019 Victor Rozek

  My father-in-law recently had a cancerous lobe removed from his lung. As surgeries go, it was relatively serious, but also relatively common. In an age of organ transplants, a lobe removal is no longer particularly noteworthy. What is notable, however, is that the procedure was performed by a robot.

  Robotics is part of the so-called fourth industrial revolution that includes companionable fields such as AI and biotech. In aggregate, they are poised to radically transform the economy. But although the word “transformation” has become a new-age descriptor for optimistic change, its consequences are purely contextual. For every automated medical procedure, …

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