TFH Volume: 36 Issue: 7 Archives

After A Few Short Years, VS Code Passes Rational Developer for i

February 23, 2026 Alex Woodie

It has finally happened: Visual Studio Code has passed Rational Developer for i in usage, according to the 2026 version of Fortra’s IBM i Marketplace Survey. The survey also shows lower adoption of greenscreen ADTS and increased use of DevOps tools, demonstrating some positive trends in IBM i application development.

It’s been barely two years since Fortra started asking IBM i customers about their use of Visual Studio Code, the free, Web-based integrated development environment (IDE) originally developed by Microsoft and set free as an open source project in November 2015. The 2024 survey (which was conducted in late 2023) …
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Why Logical Replication Has Become The New Standard for IBM i HA/DR

February 23, 2026 Ash Giddings

In IBM i environments, data is not simply something applications use. For many organizations, particularly in manufacturing, finance, distribution, retail, and government, the data is the business. Orders, invoices, inventory positions, compliance records, and customer histories exist nowhere else. If that data is unavailable, inconsistent, or unrecoverable, the business does not just suffer a slowdown. It stops.

This reality has always been understood within the IBM i community. What has changed is the level of assurance now expected around data protection, recoverability, and governance. High availability and disaster recovery are no longer judged by whether data is replicated, but by …
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Guru: Managing The Lifecycle Of Your Service Programs – Updates Without Chaos

February 23, 2026 Gregory Simmons

You’ve written your service programs, organized your modules, picked your activation groups, and maybe even set up a tidy binding directory. Everything seems perfect – until someone needs to update a procedure that half the shop’s programs depend on. Suddenly, that tidy structure can feel like a trap. Welcome to the reality of service program lifecycle management.

The key principle here is simple: change with care. Any update to a service program can ripple across every program bound to it. Without a strategy, you’ll find yourself fielding calls about broken reports, failed jobs, or, worst of all, subtle logic errors …
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IT Spending Forecast Keeps Going Up And Up, But It Won’t Go Away

February 23, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Every time we turn around, the hyperscalers, cloud builders, and model builders slap down a couple 10 billion dollars in incremental spending on AI systems to fulfill their GenAI dreams, and all the market researchers have to pull out their models and have another whack at trying to case what will be spent in the coming years. This also gives them another chance to tweak their estimates for spending in the prior year, if it needs updating.

The forecasting wizards at Gartner have just released a revised spending breakdown for 2025 and – surprise, surprise! – an upwardly revised forecast …
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IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 28, Number 8

February 23, 2026 Doug Bidwell

This week, we start with three security vulnerabilities and a warning about media issues when you put your external LTO drives too close to the running Power Systems iron in your rack.

Let’s start with the vulnerabilities, as we often do.

First, we have Security Bulletin: IBM i is affected by denial of service vulnerabilities in Db2 JSON Store Technology Preview [CVE-2025-66453], which you can read more about here. The fixes for this vulnerability are as follows:
```
IBM i Release	PTF Number(s)
7.4	SJ08547
7.3	SJ08546
7.2	SJ08545
```
Second, we have IBM i Java Development Kit 8 64 & …
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It’s Time To Get An Offsite Data Protection Strategy

February 23, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

We have nothing against tape cartridges, tape drives, and tape libraries large and small. There is absolutely nothing wrong with keeping tapes in an underground vault very far away from floods, winds, fire, and cosmic radiation. Which is why tape somewhere around 200 exabytes of LTO tape drive capacity was sold last year, and it is why tape drives and libraries comprise somewhere around 10 percent of the $50 billion to $60 billion of enterprise storage – meaning flash, disk, and tape media devices – sold each year.

Big Blue invented the IBM 726 tape drive in 1952, which was …
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After A Few Short Years, VS Code Passes Rational Developer for i

Why Logical Replication Has Become The New Standard for IBM i HA/DR

Guru: Managing The Lifecycle Of Your Service Programs – Updates Without Chaos

IT Spending Forecast Keeps Going Up And Up, But It Won’t Go Away

IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 28, Number 8

It’s Time To Get An Offsite Data Protection Strategy

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