• The Midrange Gets Pinched A Little More

  March 16, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The X86 server market turned in its best quarter ever in the final three months of 2019, will more machinery going out the door and more money coming in than has ever happened in the history of the systems market. Even if you adjusted sales in past quarters for inflation, it is still true. It was kind of crazy, even with some soft sales among OEM suppliers, the combination of ODM sales to hyperscalers and cloud builders. X86 server shipments rose by 12.9 percent to 3.35 million machines and revenues rose by 6.3 percent to $22.44 billion, according to the …

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• Guru: SQL Can Generate A Series

  March 16, 2020 Ted Holt

  Most of my work is run-of-the-mill, same-old-same-old, more-of-the-same. I’m not complaining. Most of life is mundane and routine, and that’s as it should be. Too much icing ruins the cake. But sometimes I get a challenge, and when that happens, programming can be fun.

  Today’s article comes out of such an experience. I needed a table with a week’s worth of dates in it. I could have written an RPG program, but I knew that SQL could handle the task. Today I’ll show you a couple of methods that you can use to generate a series of whole numbers and …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, March 16

  March 16, 2020 Jenny Thomas

  Social distancing isn’t a new concept for the staff of IT Jungle. We all work remote so we don’t get to spend time together in an office. (Don’t get me wrong. We like each other and wish we could see each other more often.) What is new for all of us is how to continue to operate as we shelter in place and wait to see what happens next. It might seem like our industry would be ideal for social distancing, but losing the opportunity to collaborate in the office or at a tradeshow or other event is sure to …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 22, Number 11

  March 16, 2020 Doug Bidwell

  It is hard to say what effect the coronavirus outbreak will have on the release of PTFs for the several IBM i releases in the field, and the regular pattern of updates that customers are used to. But so far, things are operating as normal, and there have been some updates. This being software and not requiring travel by any parties – and indeed, systems could be remotely patched by administrators working from home if need be.

  And here is the rundown by IBM i release:

  PTF Groups 7.4

  • SAP support required PTF list
  • MQ for IBM i – v9.0.0/v9.1.0

  …

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• Analytics Moves To The Cloud, And IBM i Data Goes With It

  March 11, 2020 Alex Woodie

  The cloud is changing the face of IT, much to the chagrin of IBM i traditionalists who are accustomed to having full control over their applications and data. Change is always hard, but the good news is that, with a little discipline, the cloud presents a number of new and exciting analytical options for your important IBM i data.

  As a transaction processing powerhouse, the IBM i server is accustomed to hosting the most important data a business ever touches, including data about customers and their purchases. On-prem servers still run the lion’s share of online transactional processing (OLTP) workloads, …

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• GiAPA Tackles IBM i Performance Bottlenecks

  March 11, 2020 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that are frustrated with persistent performance problems may want to check out an innovative tool called GiAPA. Developed by the Danish firm iPerformance ApS, the tool has alleviated bottlenecks and saved millions of dollars for some of the biggest IBM i shops in the world. Kaare Plesner, the tool’s creator, recently shared his story with IT Jungle.

  In the early 1980s, Plesner returned to Denmark after spending a year abroad working as a mainframe systems programmer. The System/38 was quickly being adopted, but Plesner noticed that it didn’t have the same level of operational tooling that …

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• What’s New with RDi Version 9.6.0.7

  March 11, 2020 Alex Woodie

  IBM last month unveiled Rational Developer for i (RDi) version 9.6.0.7, the first release of the popular IBM i development environment in about a year. With this release, IBM is giving developers a handful of new capabilities, including the ability to create procedures out of pieces of code, as well as the ability to test incoming parameters.

  RDi is IBM’s flagship integrated development environment (IDE) for the IBM i platform. The product isn’t universally used across the IBM i community, and it’s not free. But many IBM i professionals swear by the graphical and modern IDE, particularly compared to older …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, March 11

  March 11, 2020 Jenny Thomas

  As if you need another reminder of the ubiquitous COVID-19, even our IBM i ecosystem is not immune to the march of this illness. Big Blue has been taking steps to protect employees and prevent the spread, and it’s been lending some computing power to the search for treatments or maybe even a vaccine. At IT Jungle, we already work remotely so we are isolated from a workplace environment, although all of us have school-age children so we aren’t exactly comfortably wrapped in a protective bubble. There are still many safe activities that you can do without fear of the …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 22, Number 10

  March 11, 2020 Doug Bidwell

  Hello fellow IBM i-ers, and a good PTF patching day to you. The new thing that hit this week is an updated microcode for Machine-Type Models: 5148-21L; 5148-22L; 8247-21L; 8247-22L; 8247-42L; 8284-21A; 8284-22A; 8286-41A; 8286-42A; 8408-44E; and 8408-E8E. This includes System Firmware Level: SV860_215, which fixes a known HIPER issue. See this link for details.

  And here is the rundown by IBM i release:

  PTF Groups 7.4

  • Temporary Storage PTFs

  PTF Groups 7.3

  • Temporary Storage PTFs

  PTF Groups 7.2

  • Nothing here, nothing at all

  PTF Groups 7.1

  • Nothing here to see here, either

  New (or Updated) Links this week: …

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• How GraphQL Can Improve IBM i APIs

  March 9, 2020 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops are embracing APIs as a method for accessing data and programs, just like the wider IT world. As RESTful Web services overtook SOAP-based ones in popularity, IBM i shops moved with them. Now a new approach to Web services, dubbed GraphQL, is gaining traction in the wider IT world, and leading IBM i developers are right there again.

  GraphQL, if you’re not familiar, is a relatively new language and runtime for exposing and consuming APIs. The software, which was originally developed in 2015 by Facebook to streamline delivery of content in complex environments, essentially provides an abstraction …

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