The Four Hundred Archives - Page 335 of 1510

IBM Preaches Cognitive, Cloud, And IT Consumption

September 26, 2016 Dan Burger

They say it’s not just about the technology. It’s really about the business. But that brings to mind an old adage from the car industry: You sell the sizzle not the steak. Right now the sizzle is cognitive computing. It has edged out big data and analytics in the one-upsmanship match of IT leadership and the next big thing. At the Edge conference last week, when IBM executives talked strategy and road maps, cognitive computing was on the tip of tongues.

Cognitive is a differentiator, an upper hand for IBM. Big Blue has not let the world forget about Watson,

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New OpenPower Servers Present Interesting IBM i Possibilities

September 19, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

It seems increasingly likely to us that over the long haul IBM will get out of manufacturing all but the largest of its Power-based servers and its System z mainframe line, which by definition is big iron. There are a number of implications of this strategy for IBM i shops, of course, but let’s be honest here. Connect the dots and this seems inevitable.

Back in the AS/400 days, IBM made a custom machine, complete with homegrown processors and auxiliary compute, its own memory, and its own disk drives. When IBM started converging the AS400 and RS/6000 lines on the

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What’s Ed McVaney Up To Next?

September 19, 2016 Alex Woodie

In the IBM i world, no software vendor has found as much as success as JD Edwards. Sold to PeopleSoft for $1.8 billion in 2002 and now a part of Oracle, JD Edwards was the gold standard by which other ERP packages on the platform were measured. Now the principle founder of JD Edwards, Ed McVaney, is involved in another software startup in the Denver, Colorado area called Nextworld. But what does the company do?

That’s a tough question to answer, as the company is still in “stealth mode” ahead of an official launch, ostensibly, at some point

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Is It RDi Time Yet?

September 19, 2016 Dan Burger

It would be great fun to begin this article with news that IBM i enthusiasts were virtually lined up like box cars on freight trains to download Rational Developer for i (RDi), the modern graphical design tool for application development. It’s not that dramatic. Sheer numbers don’t tell the entire story, however. There’s a bit of detectable momentum. What are the chances IBM will help that momentum grow? It’s actually better than the pessimistic answer: slim and none.

One reason for optimism stems from the Rational for i team escaping IBM Software Group in 2015 and finding a more welcoming

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As I See It: The Girl Who Liked to Count Things

September 19, 2016 Victor Rozek

She was born nearly a century ago in a little town in West Virginia with the unappealing name of White Sulphur Springs. There, the well-healed gathered to escape the summer heat and soak away their ailments at a resort that employed her father. She would not have been welcome there as a guest, however. She is black.

At the time, educational opportunities for black children in her county–those who could even contemplate such lavishness–ended with eighth grade. So her parents were forced to find a high school she would be permitted to attend, the nearest being about 120 miles away.

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New Service Combats Complacency In IT Security

September 19, 2016 Dan Burger

The chilling reality of IT security weaknesses is widely overlooked and often assumed to be something that only affects someone else’s business. A close look at our own organizations makes us uncomfortable. So do stories that include expert opinions that every business should begin its security review with the realization that a security breach has already occurred. That’s how real the threat is. And your current security policy, if you even have one, is probably obsolete.

Security is an ongoing process. It’s not inherent in the system, not even the legendary IBM i platform.

“Attackers and their targets and objectives

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How Do You Do That With RDi? Part 1: Copy A Source Member

September 13, 2016 Susan Gantner

I’m an RDi fan. I make no secret about that. Even so I occasionally find things that I need to do that just seem easier or faster to do with PDM in the green screen. I don’t really mind that. I nearly always have a green screen session sitting just next to my RDi workbench anyway. But when I can find a way to do a function as easily in RDi, I prefer to do that so that I don’t need to switch modes as much.

This tip is the first in a series on things that I find some

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Determine The State Of The Error

September 13, 2016 Ted Holt

The SQL Procedures Language (SQL PL) has an effective error-handling mechanism–condition handlers. When a statement returns a certain SQL state or a certain type of exception, the condition handler takes control. However, determining which SQL state to test for can be problematic. Here are two ways.

Let’s start with a simple stored procedure.

Create or replace procedure CreatePlants
begin
   create table plants
   ( ID dec(3),  Location  varchar(16),
   primary key (ID));

   label on table plants is 'Plant master';

   insert into plants values
   (  1,  'Lost Angeles'),
   (  2,  'New Yolk'),
   (  3,  'Last Vegas');
end

What could go wrong? Well, the

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Generate SELECT For All Columns

September 13, 2016 Hey, Mike

I have a table with a long list of column names and I want to build a SELECT statement from the catalog metadata. If I supply schema (library) and table (physical file) names, is there a way to generate a SELECT statement?

—Four Hundred Guru Reader

Thanks to dynamic compound statements and global variables, the answer is yes, it’s fairly easy to construct a SQL statement for a table or view as shown below:

/* Build Select Statement and stuff it in QGPL.TEMPSQL variable */
BEGIN
    -- Fill in your table/schema name
    DECLARE @TABLE_NAME   VARCHAR(128) NOT NULL 
                          DEFAULT 'SYSCOLUMNS';

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The IBMer Who Decoded Bernie Madoff’s RPG

September 12, 2016 Alex Woodie

When Bernie Madoff’s massive Ponzi scheme collapsed in 2008, erasing $65 billion in supposed wealth, the midrange community was somewhat surprised to learn that an AS/400 was at the heart of the operation. Soon thereafter, FBI agents called Rochester, Minnesota, with a request for IBM: Give us an expert witness who can untangle the ancient RPG II code and explain how it works to a jury. That job eventually fell to longtime IBMer Rich Diedrich.

Diedrich had worked in Lab Services since the early 1990s, back when it was called the Custom Technology Center. While Diedrich has expertise in

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