The Four Hundred Archives - Page 352 of 1507

SBMJOB, CALL, And Decimal Parameters

February 23, 2016 Ted Holt

In spite of my great admiration for the IBM i operating system, I have to admit it has its idiosyncrasies. One of them, which has been there since Day 1, is the way the Submit Job (SBMJOB) command reformats decimal parameters of the CALL command. Fortunately, a relatively recent addition to CL provides an easy way to deal with this quirk.

Assume a CL program calls an RPG program, passing along two decimal variables and a character variable.

dcl  &Option       *char    1
dcl  &Account      *dec     5
dcl  &ThruDate     *dec     7

call AR100R (&Account &ThruDate &Option)

One day you are told

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XML-INTO And Optional Elements

February 23, 2016 Hey, Jon

Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here.

I am working on an RPG program that does some very basic pre-processing of an XML document before passing it along to another program for final processing. Even though my program works, it fills up the job log with error messages. Can you help me get rid of them?

The XML is structured like this.

 <Message>
  <Payload>
   <Event>. . . </Event>
  </Payload>
 </Message>

The <Payload> element can contain a child element of <Event>, <Report>, or <Parameter>. Only one of these elements is ever contained in the message at

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The Job Market For The People Who Make The IBM i Go

February 22, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Like you, we are trying to understand the current state of the IBM i community. Thus far in 2016, we have taken several looks at the dicing and slicing of the latest IBM i Marketplace Survey compiled by HelpSystems as well as providing our own insight into what industries are represented by the IBM i base and how that compares to historical data. We also did our best to try to case the distribution of system admins and programmers in the IBM i base.

This week, we want to take a look at the job market for the people in

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SEQUEL Data Warehouse Picks Up Where RODIN Left Off

February 22, 2016 Alex Woodie

Not every IBM i shop needs a big data warehouse to store and analyze information about their operations. But for those organizations whose data needs go beyond basic reporting capabilities, it is good to know there are tools like HelpSystems‘ SEQUEL Data Warehouse, which was formally called RODIN and which the company just released at version 8.0 with substantial new functionality.

It has been a year-and-a-half since HelpSystems acquired Coglin Mill, the Rochester, Minnesota, based company that developed RODIN. Once dubbed “the IBM i platforms best-kept secret,” RODIN provided enterprise-grade data preparation capabilities and extract, transform, and load (ETL)

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iNext Revealed As IBM i 7.3

February 22, 2016 Dan Burger

As psychological thrillers go, the IBM i strategy and roadmap falls short of entertaining movies like “Gravity” and “Chinatown” or good reads like “The Andromeda Strain” and “In Cold Blood.” But there’s always an element of suspense when a new release of the IBM i operating system is lurking in the shadows. Chief Architect Steve Will provided a heads up last week that what’s coming is more than the typical cloak and dagger Technology Refresh.

To the casual observer, a new release of IBM‘s best camouflaged operating system isn’t due to arrive for another two years. It was 2014

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Mad Dog 21/21: Legacy System

February 22, 2016 Hesh Wiener

In mid-2017, IBM chairman and CEO Ginni Rometty will turn 60. If she honors IBM’s traditions, December 31 of next year will be her last day as CEO. With time running low, Rometty is driving Big Blue to undergo dramatic change. She is making strategic acquisitions, executing significant disposals and forcing changes in the ranks of top executives. There’s no more Ms. Nice Gal, if there ever was one. For Rometty and for IBM, it is do or die . . . or, as some fear, perhaps both.

The most noteworthy moment in Rometty’s tenure came in October

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The Rewards of IBM i Community Engagement

February 22, 2016 Dan Burger

In a world where outlandish claims, one-upsmanship, and hyperbole are as certain as the sun rising each day, it’s no exaggeration to describe the late Al Barsa as the greatest IBM midrange advocate of all time. Like the system itself, Barsa was brilliant and meticulously thorough. He knew the system as well as anyone. The IBM midrange community needs more people like Al Barsa. Not that it has none. It simply needs more.

Barsa was a real piece of work, and that should be interpreted in the most complementary way. He could be difficult. He could be eccentric. But he

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IBM Wheels And Deals On Big Iron Compute And Memory

February 15, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

With the Power8 processors having been on the market in IBM‘s Power Systems machines for nearly two years now, and Intel widely expected to launch its “Broadwell” Xeon server processors within the next few months, you might think that Big Blue would be out there wheeling and dealing, offering all kinds of clever deals to try to keep machines moving.

Maybe IBM’s sales force is doing this, and maybe its resellers are doing this, but the past two years during the Power8 generation have been the most quiet ones I can remember when it comes to a lack of

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All Signs Point To The Cloud, But Will IBM i Crowd Follow?

February 15, 2016 Alex Woodie

You don’t need a weatherman to see that clouds are quickly building. American companies are moving workloads to big public computing clouds from Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, and others at an unprecedented rate, spurring a massive data center building boom. But will IBM i shops fall in line and move to the cloud? That’s where the forecast gets a little iffy.

There’s an abundance of signals reflecting big uptake of clouds, including public clouds run by the aforementioned companies, as well as private clouds run by managed service providers (MSPs) and IBM business partners.

A January study of

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Speed Versus Need In IBM i Mobile Initiatives

February 15, 2016 Dan Burger

As mobile access to corporate communications and data becomes more widespread in IBM midrange shops, those who are just arriving at the party can learn a great deal from those who came before them. We learn from our mistakes, but actually it’s a lot less bloody when we learn from others mistakes. And when mistakes do get made; there will be pressure to step on the accelerator before turning on the lights. Damn the darkness. Let’s go mobile!

Security and employee education are two major issues that are being de-emphasized or ignored until something bad happens. If it wasn’t for

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