• 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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• Thoroughly Modern: Giving IBM i Developers A Helping Hand

  March 9, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The good thing about the Moore’s Law improvements in compute, storage, and networking capacity is that the cost of a complete IT system more accurately reflects where the real value of that system was always really derived.

  In decades gone by, the AS/400 hardware cost represented somewhere on the order of 85 percent of the cost of a server and its storage and the OS/400 systems software accounted for the remaining 15 percent or so. Over time, the hardware costs have dropped to about a third of the overall system cost as systems have also gotten incredibly more powerful. But …

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• Guru: In Pursuit Of Reasonable Data

  March 9, 2020 Ted Holt

  My awareness of the indifference of computers toward the reasonableness of data dawned when I enrolled in the university. The band director told me to sign up for band and jazz band for zero semester hours. He said the stupid computer wouldn’t know that no one takes a course for zero hours, wouldn’t flag me to obtain permission from the dean to carry an overload, yet would grant me the credit. He was right.

  Love ‘em or hate ‘em, we live with them, we learn to get around them when they limit us, and we deal with them when they …

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• As I See It: In the Shadow of The West Wing

  March 9, 2020 Victor Rozek

  Twenty years ago, I developed an addiction. Not to one of the usual recreational substances, but to Aaron Sorkin’s writing. The West Wing was like no other show I had ever seen. It had gravitas. It explored issues of significance. The dialogue was crisp and quick. The characters had range, from funny and wise, to playful and profound. For the first time since I began watching television, I didn’t want to miss a single word.

  It aired at a difficult time for the country. The Bush administration was in the process of orchestrating two major wars, the housing bubble, and …

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• Big Blue Cuts Deals On Entry Power Systems Iron

  March 9, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With no new Power processors on the immediate horizon, except a kicker Power9’ that is aimed at supercomputer systems providing a testbed for future high bandwidth main memory technology that will debut with the Power10 chips in 2021, IBM has to do something to try to move some iron. Price cuts are always a good incentive.

  And so, we see in announcement letter ZAEP0091B, which was quietly updated on March 5, when it came to our attention, after being announced on January 24, when we did not see in the IBM online announcement feed (because it wasn’t there, not …

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