• Four Hundred Monitor, February 12

  February 12, 2020 Jenny Thomas

  We take great pride in being a respected and reliable purveyor of information in the IBM i ecosystem. But in order to distribute information, we have to find it. In the IBM i world, that data can be hard to come by. Fortunately for us, we have our editor in chief Timothy Prickett Morgan who is able to slice and dice whatever data nuggets he gets and coax out their relevance to our favorite platform. Another valuable resource for data are the surveys more and more players in the IBM i space are conducting. Your responses tell them about your …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 22, Number 6

  February 12, 2020 Doug Bidwell

  Alright people, the big news for the week is that Rational Developer for i, version 9.6.0.7, has just been released. Other than that, it has been relatively quiet on the PTF front. There are some nips and tucks for the three releases that are still being supported.

  They are as follows:

  PTF Groups 7.4

  • SAP support requited PTF list for IBM i

  PTF Groups 7.3

  • SAP support requited PTF list for IBM i

  PTF Groups 7.2

  • SAP support requited PTF list for IBM i
  • Temporary Storage PTFs

  PTF Groups 7.1

  • Nothing to see here, move along. . . .

  New …

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• The State Of The IBM i Installed Base, Part 1

  February 10, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  This is the time of the year that people assess where we are at so we can figure out where we are going. So we think it is appropriate to ponder the current state of the IBM i business.

  There isn’t just historical precedent for pondering the state of things this time of year; the pondering, in a certain way, drives history. The end of the prior year is mostly gone from memory and focus shifts toward fulfilling the promise of the current year. It is human nature to mark time this way, driven in part by the seasonal nature …

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• Thoroughly Modern: Resizing Application Fields Presents Big Challenges

  February 10, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It sounds so simple. You need to change the size of one or more fields in one or more applications. How hard can that be? Quite time consuming and labor intensive, as it turns out, if you don’t do it right. To get a sense of the issues that companies face as they tweak the fields in their applications, we sat down with Ray Everhart, a product manager at Fresche Solutions, who knows a thing or two about this issue after many decades in the field.

  Timothy Prickett Morgan: Can you tell us a little bit about your experience in …

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• Guru: ACS 1.1.8.3 Content Assist Includes Prompt For SQL!

  February 10, 2020 Birgitta Hauser

  STRSQL, the green-screen facility for executing SQL Statements, has had its days. Nevertheless, many SQL users still prefer this legacy interface over the Access Client Solutions (ACS) Run SQL Scripts facility. Others use third-party tools to execute SQL statements. The common excuse has been that the Run SQL Script facility does not include a way to prompt SQL commands, tables, and columns. In ACS version 1.1.8.3, Content Assist includes prompting for SQL statements.

  Before ACS Version 1.1.8.3, no prompting was available within the Run SQL Scripts Facility. To access tables, views or materialized query tables (MQTs), we needed to know …

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• NGS Breaks Scalability Barrier With OLAP Client

  February 10, 2020 Alex Woodie

  New Generation Software is putting the finishing touches on an overhaul of its OLAP client, called QPort SmartView, that it says removes limitations on the amount of data IBM i shops can analyze. The Windows program gives users the ease of use and flexibility of Excel on the front-end, but utilizes the scalability and OLAP processing heft of IBM i on the backend to analyze substantially larger data volumes.

  Typically, New Generation Software plays it down the middle when it comes to business intelligence and analytics on the IBM i platform. On the one hand, the company’s predominantly midsize clientele …

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• We Need Your Help Gathering Some Intelligence

  February 10, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In the absence of good information about the customer based out of Big Blue, a number of prominent companies in the vendor community have stepped up to support surveys of the IBM i customer base that give us a sense of what is going on in the base. We have an enlightened self-interest – several of them, in fact – in seeing a large number of participants from across the IBM i base – customers large and small, across many countries, with all make, model, and vintage of machines – take part in such surveys. No question about it.

  And …

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• Guru Classic: Find a View of a View of a View. . .

  February 5, 2020 Paul Tuohy

  Author’s Note: This article was originally published in October 2014. This stored procedure is something I use a lot and has saved me from accidentally deleting dependent views more than once. Basically, I call it before I ever drop a view.

  SQLs Data Definition Language (DDL) offers many great features, one of which is the ability to define a view of a view. This can lead to simple or complex structures making use of views of views of views of . . . you get the idea.

  But one of the difficulties with this technique is that, once created, it …

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• Guru Classic: A Bevy Of BIFs — Updates

  February 5, 2020 Jon Paris

  In my previous tip I returned to the “Bevy” series to tell you about the latest addition to the family: %ScanRpl. Shortly after completing that tip I realized that there have been a number of more recent BIFs such as %SubArr and some enhancements to existing BIFs like %Trimx that seem to have escaped people’s notice. In this tip I attempt to fill those omissions.

  %Trim: Specify Characters to Trim

  Let’s start with a BIF that hopefully you are all familiar with: %Trim. Before going any further I should point out that when I say %Trim, I am referring to …

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• Guru Classic: Looking For Stuff With iSphere

  February 5, 2020 Susan Gantner

  In my last Guru Classic tip I introduced you to the iSphere RDi plug-in. In this tip I’ll cover a few other features in iSphere that I find very useful. This time I’ll focus on a couple of options there that can help you search for things and subsequently edit them. The two things we’ll be searching are source members and message files.

  This tip contains a few updates to the original version of this article due to some iSphere enhancements made in the last few years. I’ve also included a few changes based on my experiences using these great …

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