• Happy Holidays And Big Changes Ahead For IT Jungle In 2017

  December 14, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you can say one thing about the AS/400 through IBM i community, it is one that demonstrates the longevity of ideas that are ahead of their time. IT Jungle, which has been publishing since July 2001, is one of the whippersnappers in this market, although The Four Hundred in various forms has been publishing since July 1989. And still, we are young. It is with this long history in mind, which is so much shorter than the System/3 machines that came out in 1969, when many of us here at IT Jungle were either unborn or (comically) had

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• RPG And The BLOB

  December 13, 2016 Hey, Mike

  I’m trying to use a SELECT/INTO embedded SQL statement in an RPG program that accesses a table that includes a BLOB(20K) column. The INTO target is an externally defined data structure based on the table. However, I get compiler errors unless I remove the BLOB column from the table. What’s up with that? —Four Hundred Guru reader The problem is that RPG doesn’t have a native data type equivalent of a BLOB (or the other large object types CLOB/DBCLOB, for that matter.) The reason for this is that large object types can be up to 2GB in size, far

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• How Do You Do That with RDi? Part 2: Compile

  December 13, 2016 Susan Gantner

  In an earlier tip, I began a series on how I do things using RDi that some people seem to prefer doing in PDM. In that first tip, I talked about various ways to copy a source member. In this tip, I’ll talk about compiling with RDi. I must confess to being baffled by the number of people I talk to who, while they do all their editing in RDi, always go back to PDM to do their compiles. To me, if you don’t compile your code with RDi, you’re missing out on a huge time-saver: the ability to

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• Talking Change Management With Chrono-Logic

  December 12, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  There is, we think, a bit of a resurgence in the IBM i community when it comes to software change management tools, which have always been one of the workhorse pillars of the vendor community and one of the key functions that need to be automated in the datacenter. To get a sense of what is happening in the software change management arena, we had a chat with Ghislain Jacques, vice president of development at Chrono-Logic, a long-established vendor in the IBM i market that has expanded its product lines and boosted its aspirations to get more IBM i

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• New LUG Spreads ‘MAGIC’ In The Mid-Atlantic

  December 12, 2016 Alex Woodie

  Starting next month, a broad swath of IBM i professionals along the eastern seaboard will have their very own local user group (LUG) to call home. Dubbed the Mid-Atlantic Group of IBM i Collaborators, or MAGIC, the group hopes to create a sense of IBM i community across a large region of the country where visible support for the platform was lagging. If you’ve been around the IBM midrange for any length of time, you realize how much the community has shrunk in size. Instead of semi-annual COMMON conferences that attracted 4,000 devoted AS/400 and iSeries enthusiasts twice a year,

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• Escape From The Tape Trap

  December 12, 2016 Dan Burger

  IBM i storage strategy remains heavily dependent on tape. Even beyond the IBM midrange, around 75 percent of all data is stored on tape. Old habits die hard, even when alternatives become easier and less expensive to manage. A good example is the Universal Backup Device designed by LaserVault. In its original form, it’s an IBM i backup appliance that appears as a tape device. Now it works in VM environments as well. The VM integration eliminates the cost of the LaserVault appliance and the cost of an X86 server. That’s roughly $6,000 to $8,000. Instead of requesting a

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• As I See It: History Repeating

  December 12, 2016 Victor Rozek

  It was a known problem 16 years ago. And for 16 years it was largely ignored, even though it poses a direct threat to representative democracy. It is a problem well understood by IT professionals and cyber security experts, and it haunts the entire spectrum of computer-dependent users from the military and political establishment, to corporations and the public. It was the subject of debate, accusation, and investigation during the recent election, and it has the power to cast doubt on its legitimacy. The problem: Through neglect or deliberate intent, computers that decide elections have been allowed to remain vulnerable

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• IT Spending And Staffing Show The Effects Of Managed Services

  December 12, 2016 Dan Burger

  Last week, an email from Computer Economics advised me of an updated report on IT spending and staffing. CE has cranked out these reports on an annual basis for many years, which is useful for long-term comparisons. These days, however, the short-term comparisons are almost microscopic. There are times when it is wise to expect the unexpected, but this isn’t one of them. IT spending and hiring leaves a faint mark on the chart that maps business growth. The indistinct spending growth that is revealed in the CE report, indicates cloud computing has the best potential for “long-term growth and

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• 7 Must-Have Open Source Products for IBM i

  December 7, 2016 Alex Woodie

  The IBM i operating system is proprietary; its Licensed Internal Code (LIC) is private, and good luck getting into the innards of DB2 for i. But for all the top-secret code running in an IBM i server, there’s a surprising amount of open source technology available for the platform, too. Here are the top seven open source products every IBM i shop should have, or at least be aware of. These products are in no particular order. But we would be remiss if we didn’t start with the big one from IBM itself. 1. Open Source Technologies on IBM i

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• Freebie IBM i Software, And Some Hardware Withdrawals

  December 7, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We are coming into the home stretch for the Power Systems and IBM i business here in 2016, and there are still some things going on that we need to tell you that Big Blue is up to with the product line. We have discovered that IBM is giving away certain licensed program products for the IBM i operating system for free, and that it is also mothballing a bunch of peripherals starting next year. The freebie software deal was unveiled in announcement letter 316-187, which actually came out on October 11 along with the fall IBM i 7.2

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