• IBM i DevOps Gets Simpler On Skytap Cloud

  February 25, 2019 Alex Woodie

  IBM i professionals who yearn for the administrative simplicity of Amazon Web Services will soon be rewarded when Skytap’s IBM i cloud becomes generally available next quarter. Among the IBM partners Skytap is tapping for the roll-out is Rocket Software, which is integrating the Aldon suite of lifecycle management tools to simplify DevOps in a potentially ground-breaking new way.

  Rocket Software is in the process of certifying its Aldon Lifecyle Manager for IBM i (LMi) software to run on Skytap‘s public cloud offering for IBM i. Late last year, Skytap, which has Amazon’s Jeff Bezos as a major investor …

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• Guru: Find The Needle In The Haystack With Watches

  February 25, 2019 Dawn May

  IBM i does a great job of logging information using messages. Messages are sent to message queues, the history log, as well as the job log. IBM i job logs can be very useful for identifying and resolving application issues. No other system has such a great logging facility for reviewing what happened in a job.

  What if you need to debug an intermittent application problem? What if the symptom is a message logged to the job log? And what if there are hundreds of jobs where this message could be sent? There are a variety of ways you can …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, February 25

  February 25, 2019 Jenny Thomas

  At IT Jungle, our business is writing. We write about the latest news and trends. We offer analysis, opinions, and tech tips. We work hard every day to be a reliable resource for everything you need or want to know as it relates to the IBM i. Part of being a good writer is being a good listener. So we were all ears when we heard IBM Champions Liam Allan and Josh Hall were starting up their own podcast where they can chat about whatever is on their minds regarding the IBM i and its ecosystem. The link for details …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Number 8

  February 25, 2019 Doug Bidwell

  Right off the bat, there are new High Impact and Pervasive (HIPER) PTFs for IBM i 7.1, IBM 7.2., and IBM i 7.3, which are the three currently support releases of the operating system. (Well, IBM i 7.1 is on extended support, not full support, so that is like having 2.5 or 2.75 releases, depending on how you want to do that math.) So, by all means, get hyper about HIPERs and get a-moving.

  As far as new links in the accompanying sheet for the IBM i PTF Guide goes, there was nothing of note this week. But check back …

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• Big Blue Finally Brings IBM i To Its Own Public Cloud

  February 18, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Well, that took quite a long time. After what seems like eons of nudging and cajoling and pushing, IBM is making the IBM i operating system and its integrated database management system, as well as the application development tools and other systems software, available on its self-branded IBM Cloud public cloud.

  Big Blue previewed its plans to bring both IBM i and AIX to the IBM Cloud at its annual Think conference in Las Vegas, on scale out machines aimed at small and medium businesses as well as to customers who want to run clusters of machines, and on scale …

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• Building A Positive Culture of Learning On IBM i

  February 18, 2019 Alex Woodie

  How do you motivate IBM i programmers to keep learning new technologies, long after they have mastered the RPG skills they use the most? There’s no simple answer to that question, which was the topic of a recent conversation IT Jungle had with PHP on IBM i guru Alan Seiden and Heidi Schmidt, the head of PKS Software.

  IBM i shops face several interrelated problems when it comes to their personnel, which traditionally is one of the biggest line items in the IT budget. These challenges include: the aging of IBM i professionals; the retirements of baby boomer-aged personnel; the …

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• Guru: Change XML Elements in SQL

  February 18, 2019 Paul Tuohy

  Over the last few years, it has become more common to store XML or JSON in a column in a table. Whereas SQL provides all the necessary functions to construct/deconstruct XML or JSON from/to relational data, it does not provide an easy means to change the contents of an element. In this article, I am going to demonstrate a technique for changing the contents of an XML element using an SQL stored procedure.

  Just to provide some background, I was recently working on a project where DB2 XML Extender functionality was being replaced with the standard XML functions. The project …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, February 18

  February 18, 2019 Jenny Thomas

  I’m sure you’ve been the recipient of a backward compliment (or maybe even inadvertently given one before). The IBM i has definitely had its share of unintentional insults, as recently as our top story below where our beloved platform was dubbed “likely the safest and most powerful server platform you’ve never heard of.” Awkward for those of us already in the know, but the intention here was good and we’ll definitely take the props where we can get them. In fact, IBM had a lot of good news to share this week, which we have wrangled and condensed for you …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Number 7

  February 18, 2019 Doug Bidwell

  As you will see in the most recent IBM i PTF Guide, there was not a lot going on this week. It looks like somebody at IBM might be taking some time off. That’s the way it goes some weeks, and we call it a win if there is not a lot of patching that is going on. That said, there are probably a bunch of you that might be a little bit behind in applying PTFs – this kind of thing happens. And if you ever get truly behind and need some help sorting it all out, don’t …

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• Guru Classic: Triggers – Allow Repeated Change

  February 13, 2019 Paul Tuohy

  Author’s Note: This article was originally published in November 2013. This has always been one of my favorite techniques for data modernization. I only wish I had thought of it back in the days of Y2K! The content of the article has been updated for free form RPG and some of the coding enhancements that have been introduced into RPG since 2013. 

  Recently, during a modernization project, I have been making use of the Allow Repeated Change (ALWREPCHG) option with before triggers. ALWREPCHG allows a before trigger to make changes to the record being inserted or updated, and that lets …

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