• Guru Classic: Call Again And Again And Again . . .

  January 16, 2019 Paul Tuohy

  Author’s Note: This article was originally published in October 2011 and recently came to mind when I had a discussion with a programmer bemoaning the fact that he could not (so he thought) have a recursive process in RPG. The content of the article has been updated for free form RPG and some of the coding enhancements that have been introduced, into RPG, since 2009. 

  In programming terms, recursion is the process whereby a function may call itself. Traditionally, this is something we are not used to in RPG. Programs and subroutines cannot call themselves. Or if you did somehow …

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• Security Posture Mixed As Feds Say ‘Shields Up’

  January 14, 2019 Alex Woodie

  “Raise your shield.” That’s the message the Federal Government sent to American businesses last week as part of a new cybersecurity awareness campaign. But according to a recent survey of security professionals by Syncsort, the majority of enterprises, including IBM i shops, are confident in the security protections that are already in place. The big question: Have they actually done enough?

  The National Counterintelligence and Security Center (NCSC) kicked off a new security awareness campaign last week called “Know the Risk, Raise Your Shield.” The NCSC says that foreign intelligence entities are actively targeting information, assets, and technologies” that are …

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• IBM Boosts Prices On Lab Services Engagements

  January 14, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Happy New Year, you have a price increase! On January 1, in announcement letter 319-030, IBM announced a pricing action and you might have not even noticed it, since it was not presented to customers in the normal wrap up of product announcements, withdrawals, and price changes that Big Blue puts out every week. We certainly didn’t see it mentioned. At any event, because we don’t trust that IBM puts everything out at once, we often periodically take a look back in the archive to see if “new” old announcements pop up.

  In any event, on January 1, IBM …

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• Guru: Easy Date Difference

  January 14, 2019 Ted Holt

  Hey, Ted:

  The dates in our database are stored as seven-digit packed-decimal values in the common CYYMMDD format. In 2018 I wrote an SQL query that reported the number of days between two dates, but it quit calculating properly as soon as it started using 2019 dates. Can you tell me the proper way to find the difference between two dates in days?

  –Becki

  I don’t know if “the” proper way exists or not, Becki, but I can show you how to do the required calculation. SQL has some handy built-in functions that address your problem.

  The DAYS function returns …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, January 14

  January 14, 2019 Jenny Thomas

  With 2018 firmly behind us, we are already looking into the future to guess what we might look ahead to in the months ahead. Our very own Editor-In-Chief Tim Prickett Morgan will be leading this charge when he joins a panel of experts, including IBMers Alison Butterill and Ian Jarman, to dissect the results of the 2019 IBM i marketplace survey. Tune in to this webinar to hear (instead of read) what Tim thinks is next for our little ecosystem. You can find the link in the “Chats, Webinars, Seminars, Shows, and Other Happenings” section below.

  Top Stories From Outside

  …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Number 1

  January 14, 2019 Doug Bidwell

  The new thing is that it is 2019, and I am convinced it will be a better year.

  In Volume 21, Number 1 of the IBM i PTF Guide, the first of the new year, there is a whole bunch going on. There are HIPER groups and new patches for Db2 Web Query for i V2.2.1 all around on the current releases – that means IBM i 7.1, 7.2, and 7.3. And there is a new Backup and Recovery groups, a new HTTP group, and a new MGTools group for the newer IBM i 7.3 and 7.2 releases.

  The …

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• Listen In To The 2019 IBM i Marketplace Survey Webcast

  January 14, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Many of you took the survey last fall, and now it is time to go over the results and take the pulse of the IBM i customer base.

  On January 17, Tom Huntington, the executive vice president of technical solutions at HelpSystems, will host two webinars going over the results of the survey, and I plan to attend as do two other familiar IBMers – Alison Butterill, IBM i product offering manager, and Ian Jarman, who had that job before and is now an executive in the IBM Lab Services division – to talk it all out.

  This is the …

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• IBM’s Plan For Etching Power10 And Later Chips

  January 7, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last summer, GlobalFoundries, the chip making conglomerate comprised of the foundry businesses of AMD and IBM plus Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing, put the kibosh on its planned aggressive ramp of 7 nanometer chip making technologies. AMD and IBM, who both depended on GlobalFoundries for their server chip manufacturing, obviously knew well before this announcement that GlobalFoundries was going to be halting development and production ramp for 7 nanometers, so they were not left in as much of a lurch as it might seem.

  Lucky for both companies, there is more than one foundry that was trying to stay on the bleeding …

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• LANSA Bought By Software Conglomerate Idera

  January 7, 2019 Alex Woodie

  LANSA, one of the oldest independent software vendors targeting the IBM midrange server and arguably one of the most successful, has been acquired by Idera, a growing conglomerate of software companies that also owns Sencha, and which is owned in part by the same private equity firm behind HelpSystems.

  LANSA was founded in 1987 by Australian businessmen Peter Draney and Lyndsey Cattermole to create and sell software development tools for the IBM System/38. When IBM launched the AS/400 a year later, LANSA supported it with its fourth generation language (4GL) development environment. It hasn’t looked back, and today the company, …

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• Guru: Arranging Query Logic in DB2 for i Routines

  January 7, 2019 Michael Sansoterra

  Hey, Mike:

  We use a stored procedure to return the result set to Java and display the results to a screen. I would like to make this stored procedure put the result set into a temporary table and then do some processing on the temporary table. Is this possible and if so how can I achieve this? Thanks.

  Your dilemma is understandable: stored procedure result sets are great when data needs to be returned to a client. However, once generated, the result set cannot be joined, sorted, or stored in a temporary table. Thankfully, a user-defined table function (UDTF) allows …

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