The Four Hundred Archives - Page 349 of 1507

Pathfinder Probes For Answers To IBM i Questions

March 16, 2016 Alex Woodie

The best programmers, by their very nature, are lazy. Why write or buy something new when the function already exists? One of the most popular commercial tools that helps IBM i developers continue to be lazy is Pathfinder, a cross-reference and documentation utility developed by Hawkeye Information Systems. Now with support for RDi and free-form RPG, Pathfinder will help free a new class of developers from programming drudgery.

At its root, Pathfinder is a programming tool. The software was first developed to work with the IBM System/3 back in 1976, and has been brought forward to the IBM i

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Maxava Introduces Subscription-Based, Multi-Platform Systems Monitoring

March 16, 2016 Dan Burger

When does system monitoring become a big enough concern to an IBM i shop that specialized software would be considered? Often it’s when one person has the responsibility for monitoring multiple systems. It doesn’t really matter if the systems run on the same OS or if multiple platforms are involved. Multiple systems ratchet up the complexity. To take on the task, Maxava has stepped up its product development.

Available now is Maxava Monitor Mi8, a cloud-based, subscription-priced, system-monitoring software for IBM i. And within two to three months, it will add the capability to monitor Windows and Linux systems as

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Slash Job Scheduler Setup Work by Half, ASCI Says

March 16, 2016 Alex Woodie

A new release of the ActiveBatch job scheduler from Advanced Systems Concepts contains new features that reduces the amount of job setup work by 50 percent, the company claims. The New Jersey software company, which supports the IBM i server with its job scheduler, also unveiled the results of a survey that demonstrates the importance of job scheduling to cloud, big data, and virtualization initiatives.

Among the enhancements in ActiveBatch version 10, which ASCI announced nine months ago and shipped in February, are a job library that contains hundreds of “production-ready” job templates that the company says enables developers to

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Getting Started With IBM i And .Net XMLSERVICE Connectivity

March 15, 2016 Richard Schoen

In my last article I introduced you to XMLSERVICE for accessing IBM i data and discussed why you might want to consider using the XMLSERVICE .Net wrapper API to connect to and utilize live IBM i data from your .Net applications. In this article, I will cover an overview of XMLSERVICE and the .Net wrapper API I created for .Net developers to use IBM i data without needing to install IBM i access. You will also get a chance to do your first connectivity test to the IBM i using the XMLSERVICE for .Net API.

Getting Started

For this session

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Dealing With A MIN/MAX Quirk

March 15, 2016 Ted Holt

The MIN and MAX functions have been a part of SQL since the beginning. A database-kind-of-guy-or-gal would think that anything so established would be stable to the point of boredom, but a database-kind-of-guy-or-gal would be wrong. MIN and MAX don’t even work the same way in all implementations of SQL, and to top it off, they have a quirk that I come upon occasionally.

MIN and MAX began as aggregate functions. As such, they locate the minimum and maximum non-null values within a column across a set of rows. On this, everyone in the database world is in agreement. The

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Generating An Insert Script From Existing Data

March 15, 2016 Paul Tuohy

I was recently presented with an interesting conundrum. Can you generate an INSERT statement for data that currently exists in a table?

For example, let’s say a table contained the following data:

EMPID NAME            GRADE BIRTHDATE  JOINEDDATE SALARY
00001 Test             AA   1956-05-14 2001-10-10  0.00
00002 Test2 - Has Null AA   null       null        null

Could I generate the corresponding insert statement similar to the following:

insert into TESTSTUFF/TESTEMP (EMPID, NAME, GRADE, BIRTHDATE, JOINEDDATE, SALARY) 
values
('00001', 'Test', 'AA', '1956-05-14', '2001-10-10', .00),
('00002', 'Test2 - Has Null', 'AA', NULL, NULL, NULL);

The original request was to generate an insert script for all

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More Thoughts On A Hybrid System Of Systems

March 14, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

If IBM is going to take on the hegemony of Intel in the datacenter, it is going to have to do a lot more than just crank up the core count of the Power processors and license them to partners so they can make their own chips and machines. That is a good start, but what IBM and its OpenPower partners need to do is make a new kind of system that brings all of the current workloads in the datacenter together and also allows for new workloads to be run natively and in an accelerated fashion on top of

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Learn Great Stuff From IBM i Champions At COMMON

March 14, 2016 Alex Woodie

There are three things that go into making IBM i a great business platform: bullet-proof hardware, reliable software, and exceptional people. If your organization invests in its people (and don’t laugh, because not every company does), it will be hard to miss this year’s annual COMMON Annual Meeting and Expo, where a group of freshly minted Champions for Power will present some compelling sessions on the platform’s latest technology.

The big annual COMMON show is still nine weeks off, but the schedule is already set. Judging by the session descriptions posted to commons16.sched.org/, you can expect to fill your

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Problem Solved, Carry On: The IBM Must Gather Tool

March 14, 2016 Dan Burger

The IBM i version of roadside assistance, thank your lucky stars, is better than a set of booster cables, a screwdriver, and a bungee cord. You have some remote tech support, some problem solving, some trouble shooting, and, best of all, you have something called the MustGather Data Capture tool. IBM Support created the tool, which is capable of automatically collecting debug data and fixing problems. It’s not Watson, but it’s pretty darn good.

The IBM MustGather tool provides an automated option for sending/uploading MustGather data/files to IBM i Support from your IBM i Server. When executed, the tool will

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As I See It: Playing With Pain

March 14, 2016 Victor Rozek

I’m loopy. Heavy drugs can do that to you. I can tell I’m loopy because my brain is operating at the speed of an impaired sloth. But I’d like to think I’m still coherent. Can’t be sure, though, because I’m loopy. (See, I just repeated myself like loopy people do.)

The full effect of pain on productivity in the workplace is unknown. Millions of people go to work under the influence of prescription drugs. And those who have difficulty functioning on drugs stagger through their day enduring chronic pain.

Pain, we are taught, is a private matter. Revealing it brings

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