• SAP HANA Now Available On IBM Power

  May 6, 2015 Alex Woodie

  After years of discussion and months of testing, SAP‘s HANA in-memory database is now officially supported on IBM‘s Power servers, giving joint SAP-IBM customers an alternative to running HANA on X86. IBM on Monday officially launched two special editions of its Power Systems servers designed to run HANA Business Warehouse software this week, while an announcement from SAP is expected soon. “I don’t think it’s a big shock to anybody that we’re entering the HANA space and that we’re doing it with a processor that was designed for big data and analytics,” says Vicente Moranta, IBM’s director and

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• BCD Cranks Up Its PHP Engine

  May 6, 2015 Alex Woodie

  It’s no secret that BCD Software likes PHP. The company, owned by Quadrant Software since February 2014, has supported the Web application programming language since it rolled out a special PHP version of WebSmart back in 2007. But with the recent launches of two new PHP bundles aimed at IBM i shops, as well as support for Zend‘s Z-Ray functionality, the company is taking its affinity for PHP to a whole new level. BCD used last week’s COMMON conference as a springboard to launch two new software bundles that combine the WebSmart development tools and Zend’s PHP software for

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• Profound Gets A Handle On Subfiles In Screen Scraper

  May 6, 2015 Alex Woodie

  When it comes to IBM i application modernization, subfile programs can present a dilemma. If you’re going the whole-hog route and getting rid of all 5250 and DDS underpinnings, you can convert subfiles into modern tables or grids. But what if you’re aiming for just a quick Web-enablement with screen-scraping tools? Keeping track of shifty subfiles here can be a challenge, but Profound Logic recently tackled the issue in an update to Genie. Genie is Profound’s fast and easy Web-enablement tool for 5250 interfaces. The company is not shy about calling Genie a screen scraper, which is exactly what it

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• Maxava Building Its Own Cloud For IBM i High Availability

  May 6, 2015 Alex Woodie

  Maxava is no newbie in the cloud. Indeed, it counts hundreds clients whose IBM i data and applications are protected by business partners who run Maxava’s high availability software in their own data centers. But those business partners don’t provide complete coverage around the world, and so Maxava is building its own HA cloud to serve them. “We’re filling a bit of a gap,” Peter Kania, director of technical services and development, said at a press conference during the COMMON conference held at Disneyland last week. “We’re starting to get into that space ourselves.” The New Zealand company is installing

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• Pipelined User-Defined Table Functions In DB2 For i

  May 5, 2015 Michael Sansoterra

  Pipes are a fantastic invention as they are useful for conveying a substance in an efficient and well directed manner. Whether used for transporting sewage, carrying oil, or even bottling a duck (if you’re old enough to remember “The High and the Flighty” Foghorn Leghorn cartoon featuring the Ace Novelty company’s “Pipe Full of Fun Kit #7”); our world wouldn’t be the same without them. Not to be left out, starting in IBM i 7.1 TR9 and IBM i 7.2 TR1, DB2 for i now offers a “PIPE” statement that is used to quickly populate rows in a user-defined table

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• 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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