The Four Hundred Archives - Page 382 of 1508

Formatting Dates with SQL, Take 2

May 5, 2015 Hey, Ted

I am trying to use your FMTDATE SQL function but the system tells me it can’t find it. I know FMTDATE is there. Can you help?

–Robert

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

I’ve received a compliment or two (at least) for the FMTDATE (format date) function I published back in 2009. (Can it really have been so long? How time flies!) I use it heavily, and I’m not the only one. If you’re not familiar with FMTDATE, please read Formatting Dates with SQL before continuing.

To address Robert’s question, the reason the system

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Ruby And Existing Databases

May 5, 2015 Aaron Bartell

Recently I came across a scenario for a customer where I was asked, “How do we interact with our existing DDS-based, composite key, database tables?” That’s going to be a very common trait of most all IBM i shops using Ruby, and this article will cover some common situations you will come across as you use Ruby to interact with existing DB2 for i tables.

First things first, let’s lay out two tables defined with DDS, as shown below. Note how the ORDDTL table has a composite key. The ibm_db Gem follows the ActiveRecord pattern and that pattern expects surrogate

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Head Power Sales Honcho Fires Up The IBM i Base

May 4, 2015 Alex Woodie

IBM i professionals are an unusually passionate and loyal group of customers, but you don’t typically hear much emotion from the IBM executives in charge of steering the ship. So when IBM’s top Power Systems salesman took the podium at last week’s COMMON conference and fired up the base with a rousing keynote address, it was a rare treat.

After taking care of business and handing out the awards in a fairly full conference room at the Disneyland Hotel last Sunday, COMMON president Pete Massiello turned the microphone over to Alex Gogh, the vice president of global sales for IBM

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IBM Upgrades High-End And Low-End Power8 Machines

May 4, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

In last week’s issue, we told you that IBM was working on rounding out the Power8-based Power Systems lineup with a four-socket midrange machine rumored to be called the Power E850 and that it was also expected to expand the high-end Power E880 line with its full complement of Power8 processors. We didn’t expect hardware announcements at the COMMON midrange conference in Anaheim, but on Tuesday last week Big Blue went and put out some of the new Power8 iron anyway without doing a formal announcement.

Specifically, in announcement letter 115-021, IBM has added some processor options for low-end,

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Cautious Optimism Pervades COMMON

May 4, 2015 Alex Woodie

It’s tough to have a bad day at Disneyland, which is officially “The Happiest Place On Earth.” But the IBM i community carries a lot of baggage, and some of it is blacker than a Maleficent curse. So when 1,000 of the community’s staunchest supporters descended upon the hallowed grounds of childhood dreams last week, unfettered joy was not a preordained outcome.

But, as it turns out, the COMMON conference that took place at the Disneyland Hotel last Sunday through Thursday came off better than expected, at least as far as the future of the platform is concerned. While nobody

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As I See It: Cold War 2.0

May 4, 2015 Victor Rozek

Russian history is one of repeated repression blanketing systemic failure. But it is also a history of a resilient people adapting to state-imposed limitations. Russia’s cultural achievements are a testament to intelligence successfully seeking expression, often against great odds.

Defying state control over their lives and prospects, the exceptionally gifted gravitated toward arenas in which they could exercise a measure of control over their careers. Whatever flavor of oppression they were forced to swallow–Czarist, Stalinist, or Communist–creative minds found refuge in fields such as literature, music, dance, and notably chess–the only global domination communism ever managed to achieve.

Move the

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An Open Letter To IBM From A Developer

May 4, 2015 Garry Taylor

The only thing that I request from IBM, is the ability to develop software for their IBM i platform. Am I asking too much? I don’t think so. Allow me to elaborate. I have been developing on IBM i since 2008. In that time, I’ve used public systems, had the use of business partner’s machines, and way back in time I had my own 9401/150 developer system with all compilers installed. Recently though, I have been wishing to ramp up my efforts on IBM i, to develop more software, more seriously.

Now, on any other computer platform I can

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The Remaining Power8 Systems Loom

April 27, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

The rumors have started going around that IBM is getting ready to launch the remaining members of the Power8 family of Power Systems machines. We had been anticipating that these machines might come out in concert with the COMMON user conference in Anaheim, California, this week or perhaps at the IBM Edge2015 conference to be hosted in May in Las Vegas. We still do not know for sure when the expected midrange and high-end Power8 machines are coming, but they are not launching at COMMON as far as our sources know.

Last fall, when the Power E870 and half of

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Fresche Legacy Advances App Dev Integration Plan

April 27, 2015 Dan Burger

A lack of IT integration is costing organizations untold, but not unquantifiable, sums of money. The noose on careless spending is tightening as the realization of integration benefits slowly comes into focus in specific areas–one of those being application development and modernization projects, which are top concerns for many businesses. Shortening the development process, increasing the quality of applications before turning them loose in production, and reducing the maintenance burden are all part of integration goals.

With integration as a target, Fresche Legacy has taken a step toward combining development tools, code analytics, and software change management by integrating its

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Power Systems Sales Return To Growth

April 27, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

It has been a long decline as the Unix and proprietary systems market succumbed to the double whammies of server virtualization and Moore’s Law increases in performance and decreases in price/performance, but it looks like IBM‘s Power Systems business may have found a new floor on which it can build some growth. That is a lot better than the overall IBM business can say, which has been slipping quarter by quarter, for years now and which did it again in the first quarter of 2015.

In the quarter ended in March, IBM booked $19.5 billion in revenues, down 11.9

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