• IBM i Innovators To Gather In Minneapolis

  June 2, 2014 Dan Burger

  Innovators earn their reputations by making things happen. They not only succeed at knocking down walls that hold back business, they pursue ideas that lead to results. Enterprise IT is a great proving ground. Sometimes it seems like a fairy tale of overnight success, but seldom, if ever, is that true. To find innovation in IBM i shops, check the attendance sheet at the RPG & DB2 Summit. People there are working for companies that understand how innovation happens. The next Summit is scheduled for September 30 through October 2 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It was announced last week that

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• Reader Feedback On IT Jungle

  June 2, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  I want to congratulate the whole team at IT Jungle for your excellent and aggressive coverage of IBM i technology and business concerns. (I didn’t check all the To: boxes in this web form, but please share my comments with your whole team, as may be appropriate.) IT Jungle has become my primary source of wake-up calls about IBM business and the i operating system. In my opinion, you have become the new leader for timely technical information. You are making me look really good at my company for “my” ability to stay ahead of the curve in managing our

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• IBM’s Investments In China Threatened?

  June 2, 2014 Dan Burger

  A published report in Bloomberg News May 27 described IBM as in a problematic position with the Chinese government. At risk are the large server contracts Big Blue has within the banking industry. According to Bloomberg, the Chinese government may force state-owned banks to remove IBM servers because of a perceived threat to national financial security. The report cites “people familiar with the matter” pointing the finger at the intensifying dispute between the United States and China stemming from allegations of spying. This unfolding drama involving IBM was revealed a week after five Chinese military officers were indicted by

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• IBM’s Server Business Has Its Downs In The First Quarter

  June 2, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The good news is that server shipments continued to rise in the first quarter, despite a slew of pressures weighing down some of the economies of the world. The bad news is that revenues are still dropping. In the first quarter, the box counters at Gartner reckon that server unit shipments rose 1.4 percent to 2.36 million machines, but sales were off 4.1 percent across all server sizes and types, with only $11.36 billion in total revenues. For its part, IBM is being hit with a kind of triple witching effect. The System z mainframes are in the middle of

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• Baker College: Learning IBM i At A Distance

  June 2, 2014 Dan Burger

  Online education may not be ready to replace the classroom experience, but the line between virtual and real continues to fade. I’ve been wondering how this applies to IBM i education at the collegiate level. At last count, there were fewer than 100 colleges in the United States with a curriculum that included one or more classes that even mentioned IBM i. Many of the instructors say those classes are on life support due to small enrollment and college administrators who don’t believe the i is relevant to students being trained in computer science in 2014. There is a need

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• IBM Gooses FlashSystem With Skinnier Flash, Faster Ports

  June 2, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As part of the series of hardware announcements that Big Blue rolled out in May, the FlashSystem line of all-flash arrays that IBM got through its acquisition of Texas Memory Systems was updated. Among other new features, the new arrays have faster ports linking back to servers and can now be equipped with skinnier flash modules. The arrays also start at a lower initial capacity, which gives them a lower initial price and therefore makes the more amenable to the budgets of midrange and enterprise shops who want to have shared flash but who don’t want to have to lay

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• The Geezer’s Guide to Free-Form RPG, Part 3: Data Structures and More Data Definitions

  May 28, 2014 Jon Paris

  In my previous tip on the new free-form RPG support I discussed the basics of the new methods for defining data in RPG. In this tip I will be covering some additional aspects of the new style data definitions that are not so obvious from a simple reading of the documentation. More on Data Definitions Until now, if you wanted to ensure that all fields of a specific type (currency for example) used a common definition, you used the LIKE keyword. The one small problem with this was that you could not change the data type of the cloned field.

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• DB2 for i 7.2 Functions, Functions, Functions

  May 28, 2014 Michael Sansoterra

  In this tip about new DB2 for i 7.2 features, I’m going to cover some noteworthy news about user-defined function (UDF) features. The feature list includes how a function name is now resolved based on casting rules, named parameters, parameter defaults and array parameters. Function Name Resolution From the earliest days of V4R4 when user-defined functions became available, I’ve had a BIG pet peeve. That pet peeve is how DB2 tries to figure out what function you want to use. For a little background, remember that a function can be overloaded. That means scalar UDF ConvertDate can be defined

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• The IBM i Journal Cache Sweeper Knob

  May 28, 2014 Joe Hertvik

  After publishing my latest article on improving IBM i journal performance with journal caching, IBM Rochester Software Engineer Chad Olstad wrote in with the following comment, which expands on journal caching and offers an alternate view of journal caching’s relationship with commitment control. “I wanted to point out the one thing you did not mention in the article is the cache sweeper knob, which controls how [old] stale cached journal entries are allowed to be before they are flushed to disk. [The cache sweeper knob] can be customized by the user as of V6R1 via [the Change Journal Attributes

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• Lining Up Power7+ Versus Power8 Machines With IBM i

  May 27, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  I checked my math and feeds and speeds twice, and I did it again just to be sure. And I would be the first to admit that after many weeks of traveling, most recently at IBM‘s Edge2014 conference in Las Vegas where I got to raise a few pints with my steady IBM i compatriot Dan Burger and some good people at IBM, I might be so tired that I didn’t do the math right. But I think I got it right, and I think that at least as far as base configurations are concerned, the Power7+ machines from

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