• BCD Tweaks Web Dev Tools. . . Focal Point Updates DR FlashCopy. . . Boadway Puts IBM i Performance Data on the Cloud. . .

  May 20, 2015 Alex Woodie

  Rounding out our IT Jungle coverage of the recent COMMON conference held at Disneyland last month, we bring you product news from three IBM i software companies focusing on Web development and modernization, hosted high availability and disaster recovery, and IBM i performance tuning. BCD Tweaks Web Dev Tools by Alex Woodie BCD Software used the recent COMMON conference as a launch pad for new releases of two key Web development tools: Presto 6.1 and WebSmart 10.8. BCD ships two editions of WebSmart, including ILE RPG and PHP editions, but the features in version 10.8 focus mainly (though not entirely)

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• Native Regular Expressions In DB2 For i 7.1 And 7.2

  May 19, 2015 Michael Sansoterra

  Blast it! Another suite of custom code I have written and used over the years has recently been deprecated (or partially deprecated) by IBM. The good news is that regular expressions (abbreviated RegEx) are now a native part of DB2 featuring one new predicate (REGEXP_LIKE) and four new scalar functions: REGEXP_COUNT, REGEXP_INSTR, REGEXP_SUBSTR, and REGEXP_REPLACE. For IBM i 7.1, TR9 must be installed and for IBM i 7.2, TR1 must be installed. The new Regular Expression Functions Require licensed product #39 5770-SS1 International Components for Unicode to be installed on both IBM i 7.1 and 7.2. (This product is

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• Prevent Overlapping In Range Tables

  May 19, 2015 Ted Holt

  In Joining On Ranges, I demonstrated that range tables are a practical replacement for attribute columns. As a rule, ranges should not overlap. (Perhaps there are exceptions.) Here’s why, and also what to do to prevent overlapping values. Overlapping ranges cause too many rows of the range table to join to a single row of another table, which in turn causes too many rows in the result set. For example, assume the following range table. FROMITEMNUMBER THRUITEMNUMBER ITEMCATEGORY 134 134999 1 1341 134199 1 488 488999 2 2 299999 3 Item 134120 would join to the first two rows

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• Job User Name And Current Job User

  May 19, 2015 Patrick Botz

  I see developers make one mistake way more often than any other. They assume that the job user name also represents the user profile under which a job is currently executing. This is, and always has been, an invalid assumption. The job user name only represents the userID under which the job was originally started. The user profile that a job is executing under at any given point in time (i.e., the current user) may or may not be the same as the job user. This may seem like a trivial and harmless mistake. But it often isn’t. In previous

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• Is There No Midrange In The IBM i Midrange?

  May 18, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As we reported in last week’s issue, IBM has indeed launched the four-socket Power E850 server that has Power8 engines. They run AIX. And of course they run Linux. The have support for the PowerVM hypervisor and they do not require the PowerKVM hypervisor that only supports Linux. The one thing that they do not support is the IBM i operating system and integrated database. This is a remarkable moment in the history of the IBM midrange, and it is perhaps one that reflects the reality of the IBM i market or one that shows IBM is, once again, giving

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• State of IBM i Security? Still Horrible, After All These Years

  May 18, 2015 Alex Woodie

  When you talk to IBM about the IBM i-on-Power platform, the word “security” is used extensively, and appears frequently next to other power words like “reliability” and “availability.” But when you talk to the security software vendor PowerTech about the state of IBM i security, you might be surprised to hear words like “wide open” and “breach fatigue.” Then again, if you have been an IT Jungle reader for very long, you may not. Last month, PowerTech released its 12th annual State of IBM i Security Study. The 25-page report, which you can download from the company’s website,

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• Mobile Access To IBM i Makes The Grade

  May 18, 2015 Dan Burger

  When a Technology Refresh gets rolled out, we find all sorts of things rolled in. Some of the items, like those picked by IBM execs Steve Will and Alison Butterill two weeks ago in an IT Jungle story, are the front runners for most valuable enhancements. But the list goes on and opinions vary. Tim Rowe puts the addition of mobile support for IBM i Access for the Web, SQL services, and new REST-based Web services at the top of the list. A big part of the IBM i reputation is its easy access to its file system, to printers

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Not As Big Blue

  May 18, 2015 Hesh Wiener

  In 2011, IBM‘s revenue exceeded $106 billion. Every year since, the company’s intake has fallen, sliding 10 percent to under $95 billion by 2014. Analysts at investment bank Credit Suisse predict IBM’s 2015 revenue will drop another 9 percent to $86 billion. The CS analysts believe IBM’s revenue will dwindle to $81.6 billion by 2018. Despite this, most investors are hanging tough. The same cannot be said of IBM’s customers, who are impressed by superior systems engineering not clever financial engineering; they understandably see IBM’s failures in the server business as a danger. In 2014, according to IDC,

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• IBM i Shops Running Oracle JDE Consider MSPs And Migration

  May 18, 2015 Dan Burger

  GSI is an application and technology consulting company specializing in helping companies that run JD Edwards ERP software. As IBM i history buffs know, JD Edwards software solely ran on IBM midrange systems back in the day. An estimated 25 percent run on IBM i today, which still means hundreds of i shops find themselves caught between a rock (IBM) and a hard place (Oracle). And let’s say GSI is a company trying to ease the pain. When GSI began its JD Edwards support business in 2004, 90 percent of its customers ran IBM AS/400s (later

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• New Power8 Midrange, PurePower Kicker To PureSystems

  May 11, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM is hosting its Edge2015 Power and System z conference in Las Vegas this week, and with the System z13 mainframes already launched in January to help that ramp get underway and bolster the company’s hardware sales, that leaves the final rounding out of the Power Systems line with Power8 processors as the star of the show. As expected, IBM is indeed launching its Power E850 four-socket midrange system, complementing the Power E880 high-end system that IBM let fly early (for some reason) ahead of the event. IBM is also including a new preconfigured cluster called the PurePower System, something

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