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  • Ain’t Nobody’s Business But Your Own

    February 1, 2016 Dan Burger

    The distance between the IT department and the executive suite in some IBM midrange shops makes a trip to Mars seem like a hop, skip, and a jump. How do you close that gap? How do you explain to the decision makers the difference that IT can make within the organization? You know what could be accomplished with investments in IT, but executive sign off on IT strategy never materializes. You’re spinning your wheels.

    You want to get traction? Build a financial foundation for the project. That’s easy to say, but harder to do. You’re going to need help. Going

    …

    Read more
  • Scared of Tests? MIMIX Has You Covered with ‘Virtual Switch’ Feature

    February 1, 2016 Alex Woodie

    Nearly one in five high availability users never test their HA setup, while more than 40 percent aren’t sure whether it will work, according to the 2016 State of Resilience report from Vision Solutions. The “set it and forget” mentality has plagued the HA industry for years, but it’s something Vision is now addressing with the new “virtual switch” capability in the latest release of MIMIX Availability.

    Vision surveyed more than 2,600 IT professionals in late 2015 regarding the state of their data resilience strategies, and compiled the results into a 60-page report that it released last week (get

    …

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  • Big IBM i Shops Get Beefier Memory

    February 1, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

    While there is no question that the installed base of OS/400, i5/OS and IBM i machinery in the world–probably something on the order of 150,000 machines–is dominated by small machines with one or two processors and only a couple of cores at most activated, there are still some very, very large customers out there. These companies are driving the performance requirements for Power Systems iron, just like big AIX and Linux shops are doing.

    While all of the world gets in a tizzy over in-memory processing, the single-level storage architecture of the System/38’s CPF and the AS/400’s OS/400 make this

    …

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  • Yet Another IBM Pricing Scheme For Power MSPs

    February 1, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

    One of the problems with hardware is that it is a sunk capital cost to acquire it, which is why financing and now cloud computing, where you lease or rent the capacity in a server or storage array rather than buy it, is popular. But the service providers building Power-based clouds are not always happy to do financing. They want IBM to offer flexible pricing without them having to take the risk.

    And so, several times over the past couple of years, Big Blue has offered special pricing for systems software and hardware to managed service providers. In announcement letter

    …

    Read more
  • Coding Is Never Without A Reason; PHP Has 10

    February 1, 2016 Dan Burger

    PHP is the open source success story for IBM i. Its support by IBM and particularly Zend Technologies has given it quite a boost. And it’s proved to be capable of leveraging the IBM i operating system, DB2 for i, and RPG code. Beyond that, it is compatible with almost every operating system and hardware platform you can name, which provides the cross-platform capabilities that demolishes siloed information.

    Several IBM i independent software vendors offer PHP development tools. Two of them, BCD Software and Zend Technologies, released an e-book last week titled Top Ten Reasons to Choose PHP for IBM

    …

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  • Run VisualAge RPG Applications On 64-bit Windows 7, 8, And 10 Over The LAN

    January 26, 2016 Dan Devoe

    With assurance of continued support from IBM, we used VisualAge RPG (VARPG) to develop modern business applications. Then IBM pulled the plug on VARPG. Nevertheless, we’ve kept our applications working, and have even managed to find a way to run them under 64-bit Windows from our LAN. Here’s how we did it.

    A Little Background

    Around a decade ago, we were looking for a way to put a modern interface on our 5250-based applications. We really liked what VisualAge RPG (VARPG) had to offer. We found many reasons to lean toward this solution, but the most enticing ones were

    …

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  • Upsert One Row From A Data Structure

    January 26, 2016 Hey, Ted

    I’m attempting to use the SQL MERGE statement to write an “upsert” that stores the data to be inserted or updated in an externally described data structure. Is that possible? Any insight into this would be helpful.

    –Lewis

    Even though Lewis was only dealing with one row in the database table, what he was doing qualifies as an upsert in my book. He’s updating a row if it’s there and adding it if it isn’t. However, I don’t think MERGE is the right tool for this job.

    MERGE is designed to update a lot of rows in one table from

    …

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  • Parsing Delimited Text Data Natively in SQL, Part 1

    January 26, 2016 Michael Sansoterra

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

    A common task for database developers is to accept a delimited text file, parse it, and dump it into a database table. This tip demonstrates a user-defined table function (UDTF) that can accomplish this task based on delimited text data stored in a CLOB or in an IFS file.

    The UDTF is called ParseFileContent and it accepts three parameters: CLOB data to parse, row delimiter character(s), and column delimiter character(s). The UDTF returns a ROWID column that represents the line number of the text data and 250 columns

    …

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  • Power Systems Turns In A Full Year Of Growth

    January 25, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

    There have been worse years in the Power Systems business than 2015, and in fact, 2014 was one of them. In its latest financial reports, IBM said that that it has turned in four quarters of revenue growth for the Power server unit, no doubt helped by an uptake of Power8 systems as customers do their inevitable upgrades. As the year wound down, IBM was running on its entry and high-end cylinders, the first time in a while when that happened.

    IBM Systems, the hardware unit of the company that sells servers and storage and is responsible for operating system

    …

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  • What To Do With All Those Spare CPWs

    January 25, 2016 Alex Woodie

    If there’s one thing that the average IBM i shop with a typical business forecast doesn’t need, it’s more CPW. The latest generation of Power8 servers offer more than enough computational oomph to get the job done, which raises the question: What should one do with those spare CPWs? With some forward thinking, the average IBM i shop maybe doesn’t have to be so average anymore.

    There is no doubt there’s a power glut of Power8 iron in IBM‘s IBM i market. Each Power8 chip has roughly 50 percent more computational power per core than the Power7 chip launched

    …

    Read more

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