• 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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• What The New Top Brass At Big Blue Means For IBM i

  February 3, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We have been expecting such an announcement for many years, but now all of the pieces are in place and Ginni Rometty can retire to chairman of the board and let other executives steer International Business Machines for the next decade or so.

  Sam Palmisano, who was an assistant to former IBM president, chief executive officer, and chairman Louis Gerstner, without question saved IBM from disaster in the early 1990s, tapped Rometty to be president back in October 2011. It is the tradition that IBM’s president becomes the next CEO and eventually chairman, so succession is not a question …

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• How To Not Fail With Your ERP Implementation

  February 3, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Over his 20-plus year career, Eric Kimberling has been directly involved in more than 1,000 ERP implementations, and in the last few years, he’s been an expert witness in over 20 ERP lawsuits. He’s seen great successes as well as dismal failures, and he has noted distinct similarities and patterns in both of those buckets, which formed the core of the concepts he shared at his Digital Stratosphere conference last week.

  One of the first things you notice about Kimberling is that he’s a plain-spoken and straightforward kind of person. The chief executive officer and founder of Third-Stage Consulting isn’t …

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• Guru: Copy OUTQ To PDF

  February 3, 2020 Bob Cozzi

  A long time ago I created a CL command named Copy from OUTQ (CPYOUTQ). This command allowed you to selectively copy spooled files from one OUTQ to either another OUTQ or to the IFS as a PDF or text file. My customers use it all the time for monthly archiving of spooled files and redistribution of output. You may have it on your own system.

  Being one of the handful of original advocates for the so called “Openness APIs” for IBM OS/400 (now IBM i), I quickly embraced the system APIs and have used them extensively throughout the decades. One …

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• Chasing AI Inference, And Other Power Systems Stuff

  February 3, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Without question, the Power AC922 is one of the best platforms for running HPC simulation and modeling workloads or machine learning training workloads, as is attested by the adoption of this platform for two pre-exascale systems at the U.S. Department of Energy dubbed “Summit” and “Sierra” by their respective Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory homes.

  As you know from our past coverage of this platform, the Power AC922 gets the bulk of its compute capacity from the Nvidia Tesla GPU accelerators embedded in the system, which can have four or six of the “Volta” V100 GPU …

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