• Four Hundred Monitor, September 11

  September 11, 2019 Jenny Thomas

  For many of us, life is settling back into familiar routines as schools go back into session across the U.S. and we all hunker back down at our desks to get done what we put off for the summer before the holidays show up to derail us again. But before we get to the IT news of the week, we would be remiss if we did not acknowledge today – Patriot Day – as the day we remember those who died or were injured during the terrorist attacks in the United States on September 11, 2001.

  Top Stories From Outside

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Number 36

  September 11, 2019 Doug Bidwell

  Some weeks are more exciting than others here in PTF Land. We’ve got some new links to tell you about and a couple of other tidbits to share. But the exciting news for IBM i customers this week is the reveal of a new Support Site coming from IBM in October! Find out more by viewing this video.

  Now back to the Guide. First, you may notice some differences when you download this week’s edition. Be aware we added a cover page as a first worksheet.

  In terms of what to look for, you will see new version …

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• Talking Digital Transformation With The New And Prior CEO

  September 9, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Here is a situation that each and every IT manager and chief information officer has experienced and will continue to experience: Having a very long conversation with the president or chief executive officer of their company about how to engage in or continue with digital transformation and the application and database modernization that this entails. And sometimes, that conversation will happen as a new person takes the helm of the company.

  That’s precisely what we did this week, but with a twist or two. We are not an IT manager or CIO, but rather an observer in the boardrooms of …

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• Software Change Management Has To Change With The DevOps Times

  September 9, 2019 Philippe Magne

  It is easier to change a system or a software development stack than it is to change the habits and preferences of people. People are the biggest friction in adopting new technologies – right up until the moment they are not. And then they are easy. So it is with any technology, and the transition from traditional software change management to open source DevOps tools is no different.

  It is ironic, perhaps, that the change comes last to the tools that track the changes. But the move to DevOps is as inevitable as it is desirable, flexible, and valuable.

  Over …

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• Guru: I’m A Number, You’re A Number, Everybody’s A Number

  September 9, 2019 Ted Holt

  Do you, like Bob Seger, sometimes feel that you are nothing more than a number? Me too. That’s because to many people, that’s exactly what we are. And if there’s one thing that computers are good at, it’s assigning numbers — to orders, to accounts, to invoices, to transactions, and of course, to people. Since we have to make the computer assign numbers, we may as well learn the modern way to do it.

  In my earliest days of programming, I would store the last assigned of a series of numbers in a data file. (The S/34 and S/36 …

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• IBM And Inspur Power Systems Buck The Server Decline Trends

  September 9, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  For the first time in 11 quarters – in other words, since the final quarter of 2016 – the server market contracted. And not just because the hyperscalers and cloud builders were cutting back on spending as they consumed the vast amount of compute capacity that they bought in 2018. Enterprises pulled back on spending, too, and every geographic region and every category of server had declines as well, many of these due to their own independent cycles and some due to macroeconomic effects.

  As we reported back in July, the Power Systems business grew 3 percent at constant …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Number 35

  September 9, 2019 Doug Bidwell

  Good people of IBM i Land, in this latest edition of the IBM i PTF Guide you will see that there are new HIPERs and Security groups for all four of the operating system releases. If you are on V7R1, please read the HIPER cover letter – there are over 100 fixes that are not on the cume and lots of dependencies. Please read and heed! And note that the PTFs for vulnerabilities below are not in this new Security group!

  There is a new DB2 for IBM i group for version 7.2, and a new version of MGTools …

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• What Open Sourcing Power’s ISA Means For IBM i Shops

  August 26, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Due to a conflict with a prior engagement at the Hot Chips conference, where IBM unveiled some of the aspects of the impending Power9′ processor that will prototype some ideas about memory subsystems that will appear in the future Power10 chips, we were not able to attend the OpenPower Foundation’s developer summit in San Diego last week. But IBM kept us in the loop, and we were intrigued to learn that Big Blue was open sourcing the instruction set architecture, or ISA, of the Power processors.

  This step is perhaps an inevitable one, given Big Blue’s desire to make the …

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• The AS/400 Operations Evolution

  August 26, 2019 Tom Huntington

  According to a 2018 ITIC survey, 59 percent of respondents cited human error as the number one cause of unplanned downtime. In that story, the president of an IT operations and cybersecurity company observed that “the root causes of downtime are the same as they were 20 or 30 years ago. But there are more of them.”

  That got us thinking. Businesses and technologies have changed over the past few decades, but why haven’t our IT processes kept pace? Why are we still suffering from downtime as the result of human error? Sure, human error can cover all …

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• Guru: Read a Data Area As a One-Row Table with SQL, Take Two

  August 26, 2019 Ted Holt

  Fifteen years ago, reader W.G. asked me about the possibility of treating a data area as a one-row table (a physical file with one record) in an SQL query. The question intrigued me because in my System/36 days, I had often wished that I could access the local data area (LDA) as a one-record data file in a query.

  Today, thanks to Scott Forstie and his team at IBM, I update my response to W.G. with more information. It’s not that the technique I presented in 2004 is outdated — it’s as relevant as ever — but that the fine …

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