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  • The Geezer’s Guide to Free-Form RPG, Part 2: Data Structures and More

    April 16, 2014 Jon Paris

    In the first part of this series I discussed why I thought that RPGers should care about the new free-form support. Since you may have seen other articles on the basics of this support, I thought in this tip I’d focus on a few examples of how existing D-specs are converted to the new format so you can see how it all works.

    Before we begin though, let’s have a quick review of the basics of this new style of data definition.

    All definitions begin with a declaration operation code. For D-spec type definitions these take the form dcl-X where

    …

    Read more
  • Here’s Help For A Huge Hardship

    April 16, 2014 Ted Holt

    Multimillion-row tables are more and more common in IBM i shops these days. Querying those monsters can be a strain on the system. Fortunately, IBM gave us some help in DB2 for i 7.1.

    The help comes in the form of a new wrinkle in indexing. The smart people who produce the world’s greatest relational database management system found a way to store aggregate (summary) information in encoded vector indexes. Here’s an example.

    Assume a table (physical file) of sales history, such as this one:

    create table Sales
      ( ID                integer as identity,
        Invoice           dec  (9,0),
        Line              dec  (3,0),
        InvoiceDate       
    …

    Read more
  • Admin Alert: Elements Of An IBM i Incident Management Plan, Part 2

    April 16, 2014 Joe Hertvik

    Last issue, I started outlining how to set up an IBM i incident management plan, going through four of the seven elements that are crucial for IBM i monitoring and response. This issue, let’s finish up and discuss the final elements an IBM i incident management template should provide.

    The Elements Of IBM i Incident Management, Revisited

    As presented last time, here are the critical elements every IBM i incident management plan should include.

    1. What type of monitoring are you doing: Manual, automatic, or hybrid?
    2. What are you monitoring for?
    3. Call trees: Who should be alerted when a problem
    …

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  • Oracle Ties In-Memory JDE Enhancement to Own Hardware

    April 15, 2014 Alex Woodie

    Oracle unveiled a new in-memory Planning Advisor last week that’s designed to help JD Edwards EnterpriseOne customers get a centralized view of their orders and their supply chains’ capability to fulfill them. The new software has been optimized to run on Oracle’s “Engineered Systems,” such as Exalogic and Exadata, and likely doesn’t run on IBM Power Systems.

    To ensure demand is met, material planners and buyers need to bring together all sorts of data, including current inventory levels, demand information, and other pieces of information. JD Edwards shops, like the users of any ERP or MRP system, often string together

    …

    Read more
  • Heartbleed Postmortem: Time to Rethink Open Source Security?

    April 15, 2014 Alex Woodie

    If you feel sick to your stomach from the Heartbleed OpenSSL bug, you’re not alone. The retailer Target may have lost data on 100 million customers, but that’s nothing compared to the billions of supposedly secure online transactions conducted across millions of websites over the past two years that we now know were potentially exposed and could be fodder for hackers. For IBM i customers, who have basked in the shadowy protection that IBM‘s (mostly) proprietary architecture has afforded them for decades, the question becomes: Can we trust open source to protect us?

    The good news is that it

    …

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  • PDFs That Automatically Submit Data to IBM i

    April 15, 2014 Alex Woodie

    New software from Computer Keyes allows users to do something pretty cool. Presented with a PDF document, the user enters his data, presses the “submit” button, and the document is automatically uploaded to the IBM i server where applications can process it. The new capability is the result of updates to two Computer Keyes products, including kLink and KeyesOverlay.

    By all accounts, PDFs have become the defacto standard format for businesses and consumers to exchange documents over the Internet. Whether you’re submitting an invoice, applying for a mortgage, or transmitting a scanned document, chances are good that Adobe‘s Portable

    …

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  • RDi 9.02 Delivers Full Support for Free-Format RPG

    April 15, 2014 Alex Woodie

    IBM signaled that it’s close to completing its latest effort to move RPG developers to free format coding last week when it announced Rational Developer for i (RDi) 9.0.2. The company also announced withdrawal dates for older releases of IBM’s flagship IDE and related products for developing RPG, COBOL, Java, and C applications.

    When IBM delivered the bits for IBM i version 7.1 Technology Refresh 7 last fall, it transitioned nearly all of RPG IV to free format. The delivery of free-format capabilities for F and D specs (to go along with the existing free-format capabilities for C specs)

    …

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  • Bug Busters RSF 10.0 Brings Better HA Role Swaps, Automated Updates

    April 15, 2014 Alex Woodie

    IBM i shops that use Bug Busters Software Engineering‘s Remote Software Facility (RSF) for high availability protection will find improvements in the role swap process with the latest version 10 release. The company also bolstered the base RSF product with new automated update capabilities, which keeps the customer’s RSF implementation in lockstep with Bug Busters.

    RSF’s new automated update functionality is right up the alley for the traditional use of this Bug Busters’ product. RSF’s original reason for being was to simplify the replication of application objects from one centralized AS/400 to multiple remote AS/400s used for development, test,

    …

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  • TaxCloud Works with IBM i, Krengel Says

    April 15, 2014 Alex Woodie

    Congratulations! You made it to April 15, Tax Day! Hopefully you can put the 2013 tax year behind you, and start fresh with the 2014 tax year. Oh boy! Of course, there’s always sales tax to worry about. But according to the IBM i developers at Krengel Tech, there’s an easy way for retailers who rely on the IBM i server to get free sales tax processing from the TaxCloud service.

    TaxCloud is a free online service that was launched by the private, Seattle, Washington-based company FedTax in 2008. Designed primarily for online retailers, the service automatically calculates sales

    …

    Read more
  • Train Control Upgrades Lead Railroad to Upgrade IBM i Systems

    April 15, 2014 Alex Woodie

    The Belt Railway Company of Chicago (BRC) has tapped OnX Enterprise Solutions (formerly Worknet) to provide business continuity and disaster recovery solutions for its IBM i-based applications, OnX announced recently. The adoption of the managed service provider (MSP)’s offerings is key to BRC’s transition to the positive train control system mandated by the government.

    Railroads have until 2015 to implement positive train control (PTC), a new control system that’s being put in place for North American Class I freight railroads. Key to PTC is that the train receives information about its location and where it is allowed to safely travel,

    …

    Read more

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