The Four Hundred Archives - Page 327 of 1508

RPG Open Source Horse Pulls IBM i Community Plow

November 7, 2016 Dan Burger

The RPG development community is shrinking. I don’t mean because old programmers are riding into the sunset. I’m talking about collaboration and its ability to guide development that benefits the community by addressing the chAllanges of next generation applications for IBM midrange shops. Not that a collaborative open source culture is thriving here. But it could and it should. There are efforts to get this under way. And that will figuratively shrink the community.

Tim Rowe, IBM i business architect for application development and systems management, supports the idea.

“Why not have an RPG open source community? We have a

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Imagine There’s No Spinning Disk (It’s Easy If You Try)

November 7, 2016 Alex Woodie

The odds of finding a hard disk drive in your next storage array grows slimmer by the day as the cost of solid state disks continues to drop. The price/performance curve for SSDs has improved so much relative to spinning disk, in fact, that decision makers in IBM‘s storage division see a day when data goes straight from flash to tape as it cools, or what they term “FLAPE.”

“The 15K RPM drives are going away,” Gary Albert, business line executive for IBM Storage, tells IT Jungle. “There’s going to be one more generation [of 15K RPM drives],

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The Hybrid Cloud Questions IBM i Shops Should Be Asking

November 7, 2016 Lief Morin

When companies speak with service providers about hybrid cloud technology, many of them want to know right off the bat how much money they can save. That’s the wrong question to ask. The first questions should be: What business challenges do we face? Can the cloud help to address these challenges? And to what extent should we be using the cloud?

A transition to the cloud or a hybrid environment can provide companies with many benefits aside from cost savings, such as a broader set of services, a highly resilient architecture and the addition of a professional organization that manages

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The New Tech Canoe: Paddle Less, Go Farther

November 7, 2016 Dan Burger

The unevenness of enterprise IT due to rapidly changing technology invariably puts pressure on companies unwilling or unable to invest in transforming their established core IT infrastructure consisting of primarily systems of record to a higher octane blend with greater emphasis on systems of engagement. Strategic reactions to this shift are happening throughout the IBM midrange, where the IBM i community–end users and software vendors–has a major presence and a conservative perspective.

At the recent VAI Conference 2016, navigating transformation was the key ingredient in discussions around building efficiencies, reducing costs, increasing market share and resulting in profitability gains.

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IBM i Access Client Solutions For Database

November 1, 2016 Paul Tuohy

If you are an SQL user, you need to get your hands on IBM i Access Client Solutions. After some false starts, it looks as if IBM is heading in the right direction again when it comes to providing tools to help us develop and use SQL. I want to take you through some of the highlights of the database functions of IBM i Access Client Solutions.

Some Background

Over the last few years, trying to find the right tools for the SQL developer has been quite a challenge. There were Run SQL Scripts in System i Navigator, the

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SQL PL–The FOR Loop

November 1, 2016 Ted Holt

SQL PL has four looping structures. The most useful one, to my way of thinking, is the FOR structure. It is different from–and more powerful than–the RPG FOR op code, and it’s easy to learn and use. Here’s how it works.

FOR iterates over a read-only result set and terminates when there are no more rows to process. Think of a FOR loop as a read-only cursor without the messiness of OPEN, FETCH, and CLOSE. Let me illustrate with a stored procedure.

create or replace Procedure Billing (in p_BillingCycle dec(3))
for One_Customer as
   select c.AccountNumber
     from customers as c 
    where

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Beyond Hello With Node.js

November 1, 2016 Aaron Bartell

In Why Node.js? we discussed Node.js and how to get up to speed with “hello world” from a program, the Node.js REPL (Read, Eval, Print, and Loop), and a web application. Now we will build on that knowledge by actually creating an application to show your team.

A gent by the name of Rainer Ross recently posted a link to the IBM i Professionals LinkedIn group declaring the benefits of the new Webix framework. (Webix.com is freemium software. There are free versions and paid versions. Please adhere to the licensing.) Because of my comments on his post I received an

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IBM’s Power Systems Stalls A Bit As Power8 Wanes

October 31, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

With the Power9 chips slated for some time in the second half of next year, and the Power8 systems not being upgraded with a formal Power8+ variant, it is not surprise to us that sales of Power Systems iron based on the Power8 chip that launched in April 2014 are waning. It is the nature of every product cycle to have its ramp, its peak, and its slide. The slide is just a way to extract profits, with the ease of sales and improving yields on chips compensating for the fact that Big Blue has to discount more to move

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VAI Pours Business Intelligence Into Midmarket ERP

October 31, 2016 Dan Burger

During the past several years, VAI has rerouted its ERP software roadmap with a modernization plan that included Web and mobile development, cloud-based managed services, and now business intelligence analytics. At the company’s user conference last week in New Orleans, it provided a peek at the BI component in S2K Version 6, which is in the hands of a few customers now and is expected to be generally available in Q1 2017.

VAI’s S2K software is running core business applications in approximately 1,500 IBM midrange shops, primarily in the distribution, manufacturing, and retail industries. The privately owned and family operated

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The Time And Tech Are Right For Online Backups

October 31, 2016 Dan Burger

Logically, tape backups shouldn’t be as popular as they are. The process is cumbersome and hardly aligned with the accelerating pace of IT capabilities and business decision making. When you factor in the recovery time for most companies that rely on tape, the logic becomes twisted. Even with automation, shorter backup windows, multi-platform complexity, and regulatory compliance combine to push the question of whether tape is reasonable, in spite of its widespread popularity.

The online, service-based, backup alternative has been in place for almost 30 years with many improvements during that time. Internet connectivity, CPU capacity, data compression, encryption, and

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