The Four Hundred Archives

Where Does SAP On IBM i Go From Here?

January 15, 2020 Alex Woodie

In Monday’s issue of The Four Hundred, we covered some of the challenges that SAP has created for itself by having two very different mainstream ERP suites (see “SAP Sending Mixed Messages on ERP Platform Support.”) On the one hand, it wants to move forward with S/4 HANA, but on the other hand, it doesn’t have all the features that exist in the older Business Suite. That puts customers who run Business Suite on IBM i in a bit of a bind.

HANA debuted in 2010 as an in-memory columnar database for handling online application processing (OLAP) workloads. In …
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Update On Migration Of developerWorks Content

January 15, 2020 Alex Woodie

On New Year’s Day, IBM fulfilled its promise to turn off the developerWorks Connections website, which hosted technical content posted by members of the IBM i community. But before it hit the “delete” button, Big Blue worked with content owners to migrate the most active content to other websites, to redirect browser traffic, and to archive the rest.

IBM made good on its previous promise to ensure that no content was left behind when it permanently shuttered the popular developerWorks Connections website. It was forced to make that promise after it caused an uproar in October, when it announced that …
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SoftLanding Turbo Charges IBM i Disk Utility

January 15, 2020 Alex Woodie

Data storage volumes are doubling every 12 to 18 months for the average organization, which means it’s more important than ever to keep on top of production storage resources. On the IBM i platform, a new release of the Supermon Disk product from SoftLanding Systems should help organizations monitor disk usage.

Regular maintenance of production storage environments is critical to ensuring smooth operations. On the IBM i server, where disk storage and memory combine to form one single-level storage pool accessible by programs, it’s perhaps even more critical to keep DASD below a certain utilization threshold (usually about 85 percent). …
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Four Hundred Monitor, January 15

January 15, 2020 Jenny Thomas

Welcome back! For many of us, this is the first real work week of the new year, full of possibilities and ambitions as we steam ahead into 2020. But just because 2019 is now in the rearview doesn’t mean we can’t take a look back at what a year it was. IT Jungle’s own Alex Woodie recently revisited the biggest IBM i stories of last year, and it’s a fun read and reminder of all that happened during our previous trip around the sun. For a peek into the future, don’t miss IT Jungle editor in chief Timothy Prickett Morgan …
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IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 22, Number 2

January 15, 2020 Doug Bidwell

As you well know, there is an issue with LPARs that are hanging on machines that have the latest Technology Refreshes applied to IBM i 7.3 and IBM i 7.4 in cases where the Hardware Management Console (HMC) is not managing the partitions. The details of the issue with the Technology Refreshes are outlined in APAR MA48101, and what it means is that a guest partition created with Virtual Partition Manager (VPM) inside SST or Integrated Virtualization Manager (IVM) will hang on IPL after the apply of the TRs. This gets real elaborate, so we strongly suggest you review …
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There’s Always A New Last Laugh With Legacy

January 13, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

On my bookshelf beside my desk is a shelf that has all of my relevant AS/400 books and copies of the first decade of The Four Hundred, back when it was a monthly newsletter printed on paper. Sometimes, when I get stuck for ideas, I page through my history and yours, and I am often amazed at the wealth of information that myself and my colleagues – as well as many, many sources – helps us to create. AS/400s were a lot more expensive than IBM i machines, and helping people save money was our primary mission, and there …
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SAP Sending Mixed Messages On ERP Platform Support

January 13, 2020 Alex Woodie

Thousands of SAP Business Suite customers around the world are awaiting clarification from the German software giant about whether their chosen ERP software will continue to run on their chosen platform in five years. SAP is strongly hinting that it may move forward just with S/4 HANA, which at the moment is a Linux-only affair. But its actions suggest a more diverse array of databases and operating systems may be accommodated in the future.

Questions about SAP’s intentions originated with a statement it made in 2014. At that time, SAP announced that it would fully support its current flagship …
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Guru: Formatting Numbers and Dates/Times/Timestamps in SQL

January 13, 2020 Paul Tuohy

In this article, I want to share with you an SQL scalar function that I happen to have been using quite a bit recently. At times, when using an SQL select statement, you may want to format a number or date. Something along the same lines as using the %EDITC or %EDITW built in functions in RPG or the EDTCDE or EDTWRD keywords in DDS. In SQL we can use the VARCHAR_FORMAT or TO_CHAR (they are synonyms for each other – both work exactly the same way) scalar function to provide similar functionality.

Since they are synonyms for each other, …
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As I See It: Digital Trafficking

January 13, 2020 Victor Rozek

The Constitution and the Bill of Rights contain many fine words but “privacy” is not among them. At best the right to privacy is implied in the 4th Amendment, which protects against unreasonable search and seizure, and the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment that protects against the arbitrary denial of life, liberty, or property.

One would think that the systematic and deliberate tracking of our movements would constitute an unreasonable search and seizure or, at the very least, an infringement on our liberty. But the founding fathers could not have conceived of a technology that digitized human beings …
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IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 22, Number 1

January 13, 2020 Doug Bidwell

We want to remind you once again about the LPARs that are hanging on machines that have the latest Technology Refreshes applied to IBM i 7.3 and IBM i 7.4 in cases where the Hardware Management Console (HMC) is not managing the partitions. The details of the issue with the Technology Refreshes are outlined in APAR MA48101, which is essentially a bug report that warns customers of an issue with the software stack and oftentimes gives hints about when and how it will be fixed.

Here is the issue in a nutshell: IPL-SRCC6003962-WAIT Hang with IBM i 7.3 with …
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