TFH Volume: 31 Issue: 10 Archives

IBM i Groups Cautiously Adding In-Person Events To Schedules

February 8, 2021 Alex Woodie

Nearly one year after the novel coronavirus reared its nasty head in the United States, shutting down large swaths of the economy and forcing hundreds of millions of people to shelter at home, there is the hint of a glimpse of a ray of sunshine: The possible return of in-person events in the IBM i community. Maybe, anyway. Or maybe not.

While nothing is certain in these unprecedented, topsy-turvy times, it appears that several IBM i groups are planning to host physical events where actual humans will be allowed to congregate with other humans for the purpose of learning about …
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Thoroughly Modern: Understanding Your IBM i Web Application Needs With Application Discovery

February 8, 2021 Scott Gingerysty and Derek Woods

Considering web and mobile development on IBM i? Before you start coding, it’s helpful to assess and validate your vision with a Discovery. Adding this step to your development process increases the likelihood that your project will succeed because it gives stakeholders a clear understanding of what you need, how the application will solve users’ problems and what it will cost.

Fresche’s Web Application Development team is frequently called upon to consider a new business application and estimate how much it will cost to build it. With the amount of detail we typically have at this point (to wit: almost …
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Guru: The Uncertainty of Redundant Row Selection

February 8, 2021 Ted Holt

Is redundancy good or bad? I say it depends. According to Nassim Nicholas Taleb, “Redundancy is ambiguous because it seems like a waste if nothing unusual happens. Except that something unusual happens — usually.” I have seen some unusual behavior when joining database tables, but try as I might, I can’t figure out what that unusual behavior depends on. Let me show you what I mean.

First, we need some data for illustration. Let’s say that our company uses an ERP system that was designed for make-to-stock manufacturing. What the factory builds goes into the warehouse, and customer orders are …
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Feeling Insecure About The Weak Security At Most IBM i Shops

February 8, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

It is always a wonder to us that, in this day and age, every IBM i shop, which is by definition running mission critical workloads, is not using high availability clustering of systems in their datacenter, disaster recovery and failover of some type or another to a remote site, and supplemental security to lock down those parts of the system that are not, by default within the IBM i platform, locked down.

It’s a bit of a mystery. Of the 120,000 to 150,000 unique customers running IBM i platforms in the world, maybe 20,000 have some sort of HA/DR and …
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The Humongous Investment In IBM i People

February 8, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

It has been common knowledge since the Application System/400 minicomputer platform was launched in June 1988 that the vast majority of customers buying these machines either developed their own code in RPG or COBOL – mostly RPG, except in banking and insurance, which had a mainframe heritage and preferred COBOL – or had access to the source code from third parties and heavily customized it to the point where they were self-maintaining the applications at some point. In many cases, they used a mix of homegrown and third party modules and did the integration themselves.

This history continues, and is …
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IBM i Groups Cautiously Adding In-Person Events To Schedules

Thoroughly Modern: Understanding Your IBM i Web Application Needs With Application Discovery

Guru: The Uncertainty of Redundant Row Selection

Feeling Insecure About The Weak Security At Most IBM i Shops

The Humongous Investment In IBM i People

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