TFH Volume: 30 Issue: 15 Archives

Big Blue Raises IBM i Software Maintenance Fees Modestly

March 2, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Back in the AS/400 days when software was a much smaller part of the overall cost of a system, there were relatively frequent prices changes for both OS/400 and related systems software as well as for the software maintenance applied to OS/400 and those related systems programs.

It has been a long time since IBM increased the license or IBM i Group Software Maintenance, or SWMA as we often call it as shorthand (pronounced Swammah). I can’t even remember the last time IBM i license prices were increased, but I know there was an attempt to raise SWMA prices …
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Boadway’s 25-Year Performance Shows No Let Up

March 2, 2020 Alex Woodie

Batch jobs running a little long? Throw some hardware at it. For as long as Mike Boadway can remember, that’s been the default response to dealing with most performance issues on the IBM i server. But when today’s fast Power9 processors and Flash drives fail to move the performance needle, maybe it’s worth reconsidering Boadway’s approach to tweaking the code and the data instead.

As the CEO of MB Software & Consulting, Boadway makes his living off solving other people’s IBM i performance issues. Since founding the company in 1995, Boadway has used his proprietary software to deliver an …
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Guru: Practicing Safe Hex in RPG

March 2, 2020 Jon Paris

In this tip I’m going to address a question that arises regularly on RPG-oriented Internet lists, namely: “Is there an easy way to convert a character string to its hexadecimal equivalent?”

One answer, of course, would be to write your own routine using lookup tables, but there is a far easier way. We can take advantage of the system’s hex MI APIs. These were originally surfaced for use by C and C++ but, thanks to the joys of ILE, can be used by any ILE language. Not only that, RPG’s prototyping support makes them really easy to use. In fact, …
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Please Take The 2020 State of Modernization Survey

March 2, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

It wasn’t all that long ago that whatever information that we needed about the IBM midrange community had to come from Big Blue or once in a while one of the big IT market watchers like IDC and Gartner would get paid to think about our community and they would do what we usually considered a half-hearted job of it.

In the past several years, a number of independent software vendors in the IBM i market have taken the bull by the horns and, with the help of publications like The Four Hundred, have gathered up vital intelligence through …
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IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 22, Number 9

March 2, 2020 Doug Bidwell

There is rarely a week that there isn’t something going on with PTF patches for the IBM i operating system, its integrated database, and the whole stack of software wrapping around that operating system. This would be one of those normal weeks, where there is nothing too crazy going on but there is stuff to pay attention to.

We also had a leap year Saturday for the IBM i PTF Guide, which doesn’t happen very often. The Gregorian calendar has a 400-year – well, 146,097-day – cycle, and of these days, there are 97 days that correspond to February …
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Big Blue Raises IBM i Software Maintenance Fees Modestly

Boadway’s 25-Year Performance Shows No Let Up

Guru: Practicing Safe Hex in RPG

Please Take The 2020 State of Modernization Survey

IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 22, Number 9

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