• Four Hundred Monitor, March 20

  March 20, 2019 Jenny Thomas

  Did you know today, March 20, is considered the first day of spring? At least in the Northern Hemisphere it is. Also known as the spring equinox, today the length of the day is nearly equal in all parts of the world. While those of us on the Northern side of the globe start to enjoy longer, sunnier days, we can all enjoy the latest news from in and around our IBM i ecosystem. Be sure to check out our calendar at the bottom section for travel opportunities – a trip to COMMON in Southern California sounds like a great …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Number 11

  March 20, 2019 Doug Bidwell

  Enjoy the quiet while you can, there are no new cumes or groups for any release this week. However, regarding updating QMGTOOLS, here is the command that checks for and pulls down the update if necessary, then installs it:

  QMGTOOLS/CMPVER NOPROMPT(Y)
  

  You might want to think about putting this command into your scheduler for every Sunday morning.

  There are no new defectives this week, but once again here is the most recent defective PTF rundown (The last defective for each release):

  	Defect		Defective	APAR	Fixing
  	Date		PTF			PTF
  	--------	--------	-------	-------
  7.3	03/05/19		MF65608	MA47478	MF65690 (Available!)
  			MF65603
  			MF65584
  			

  …

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• Entry Power S812 Gets A New – But Still Short – Lease On Life

  March 18, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Despite the fact that Moore’s Law increases in performance in CPUs have been slowing for years, for many customers, the growth in the throughput performance of processors as more cores and threads are added to a Power9 chip have outstripped the capacity growth requirements for many IBM i shops. For many of these customers, a single core Power7, Power7+, or even Power8 processor did the trick just fine, and is better suited to their needs than an entry Power9 machine with just one core running IBM i.

  We would argue – and have argued many times – that what IBM …

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• Wanted: Exciting New Publicist For Boring Old Server

  March 18, 2019 Alex Woodie

  You don’t need a marketing guru to tell you the IBM i server has a publicity problem. Outside the cloistered midrange community, nobody knows that it even exists. Even some of the companies that run their businesses on it don’t know it exists. Unicorns and leprechauns, which don’t exist, have a greater mindshare than the IBM i server. And the funny thing is, that’s exactly how it was all designed.

  According to industry analyst Rob Enderle, the IBM i server is a world leader in one computing category: boredom.

  “You put it in, you leave it alone, and it just …

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• Guru: When Playing With SQL

  March 18, 2019 Paul Tuohy

  One of the questions I have been asked a lot at conferences is “How do you figure out x in SQL?” In this article, I will discuss four things I use a lot when playing with SQL in Run SQL Scripts: VALUES, SYSIBM.SYSDUMMY1, global variables, and the system catalog.

  VALUES

  When I am trying to figure out how an SQL function works, my first port of call is the VALUES statement. VALUES derives a result directly from an expression. For example, the following statement:

  values upper('paul');
  

  Would generate the following result set:

  

  You can specify more than one value in …

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• As I See It: The Useless Class

  March 18, 2019 Victor Rozek

  My father-in-law recently had a cancerous lobe removed from his lung. As surgeries go, it was relatively serious, but also relatively common. In an age of organ transplants, a lobe removal is no longer particularly noteworthy. What is notable, however, is that the procedure was performed by a robot.

  Robotics is part of the so-called fourth industrial revolution that includes companionable fields such as AI and biotech. In aggregate, they are poised to radically transform the economy. But although the word “transformation” has become a new-age descriptor for optimistic change, its consequences are purely contextual. For every automated medical procedure, …

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• Are You Experienced? IBM i Users Weigh In

  March 18, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We spend a lot of time here at The Four Hundred thinking about the vintage of the hardware, operating systems, and applications running on the IBM i platform and its forbears. But we are also concerned, as you know, with the vintage of the people who are running and programming the systems out there in the IBM midrange installed base.

  It is hard to get any quantifiable data on the people out there running the platforms – and we thank you, as loyal readers of this publication for several decades now for being in this market for even more decades …

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• Building Out The .NET Stack Around Mono for IBM i

  March 13, 2019 Alex Woodie

  The first release of a Mono .NET port to IBM i was issued last year. Since then, the IBM i open source community has been busy building many of the other middleware components that will make it easier for developers to build IBM i applications using Microsoft tooling.

  Mono was ported to AIX and IBM i (via the PASE AIX runtime) last year, which gave IBM i and AIX shops the capability to run the open source .NET runtime on Power Systems servers, thus opening the door to allowing Microsoft‘s highly regarded suite of development tools to be …

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• Supreme Court Weighs In On Oracle Vs. Rimini Street

  March 13, 2019 Alex Woodie

  The United States Supreme Court last week ruled against Oracle in its ongoing copyright infringement case against Rimini Street, handing the provider of third-party support services for JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, and Siebel ERP and CRM software a legal victory in the nation’s highest court.

  It’s not often that lawsuits involving enterprise software and services make their way up to the Supreme Court. In this case, the nine justices were asked to rule on a relatively narrow disagreement between the two parties over what legal costs can be recovered. Oracle already prevailed in its copyright infringement case against Rimini Street, which …

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• Five Acquisitions You May Have Missed

  March 13, 2019 Alex Woodie

  The New Year has started off with some wheeling and dealing, as some software company owners look to bulk up while others look to hand off responsibility to somebody else. Those operating in the IBM i marketplace aren’t alone in making acquisitions. Here are five under-the-radar deals in the midrange that you may have missed.

  Attunity‘s line of real-time data integration software will now be sold through Qlik, which acquired the publicly traded company in a $560-million in late February. It was a natural enough move for Qlik, the well-regarded BI vendor that was acquired by private equity …

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