• Reader Feedback On Third Party’s A Charm For JDE Maintenance Contracts

  April 30, 2012 Hey, Dan

  There’s another issue with going to third-party maintenance for JDE World: operating system upgrades. We looked at dropping World A7.3 maintenance a few years ago. We found out, however, that if we ever wanted to upgrade from i5/OS V5R4 to IBM i 6.1, we needed Oracle to provide us with the proper updated objects so we could run on the new OS. Oracle/JDE was only willing to do that if we stayed on maintenance. And oh, by the way, there is a significant penalty if you get off maintenance and get back on again. So from my point of view,

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• IBM Boosts Share Buybacks And Dividend

  April 30, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  This was about as predictable as tomorrow’s sunrise. IBM‘s top brass are feeling so good about its financial prospects this year that it has once again raised its dividend and asked for and received approval from Big Blue’s board of directors to spend huge piles of cash buying back stock. In a statement last week, new president and CEO, Ginni Rometty, said the board has approved another $7 billion to be spent on share buybacks, adding to an existing authorization from last year that still had $5.7 billion left in the kitty. “We continue in our commitment to deliver

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• IBM Finds Signs Of Talented Youth At AITP

  April 30, 2012 Dan Burger

  There was something happening here. Aaron Bartell has presented dozens, maybe hundreds, of technical sessions on the local user group circuit and at the notable IBM i conferences like COMMON, DevCon, and the RPG & DB2 Summit. His audiences are diverse, but one thing they aren’t is young. As he looked out at the attendees of his most recent session, he was struck by the change in landscape. Everyone was young. Bartell was presenting a session called “Introduction to Android Development for RPG Programmers” in a classroom of about 40 interested college students at the AITP National

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• Fax Incentive Program Offered By Quadrant Software

  April 30, 2012 Dan Burger

  Backing up its launch of fax over IP (FoIP) software earlier this month, Quadrant Software has introduced a Quadrant FastFax customer trade-up program that provides a path for companies to migrate from its existing hardware/software combination to QuadraDocV virtual FoIP software. Companies that are staying with the traditional fax hardware setup will find a trade-in discount program as well. The benefit of moving from hardware-based fax is the elimination of hardware management and maintenance and the canceling of subscriptions for analog phone lines. FoIP software runs within a VMware virtual machine. It provides the same fax capabilities as Quadrant’s hardware-based

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• SAP Targets 1 Billion Users And €20 Billion In Sales By 2015

  April 30, 2012 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The top brass at German application software giant SAP are just as competitive in the sport of sailing with rival Oracle as they are in the application software business–and are picking up steam in the cloud and databases businesses, too. SAP does not have as large a business on the IBM i platform as Oracle or Infor, but it does nonetheless have a few thousand key customers who are running its various ERP stacks on the progeny of the AS/400. Last week, SAP reported its financial results for the first quarter of 2012 ended in March, and overall sales

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• NOMAX? No Way!

  April 25, 2012 Hey, Ted

  I just read *NOMAX Does Not Mean Infinite Capacity and I politely beg to differ. I work at some shops with smaller and older systems with smaller disk capacity (70 GB, 140 GB). Some are already using more than 70 percent of available space. If I read the capacities correctly, a physical file can hold over four billion records. I did some calculations and I think I’d fill up a system before reaching capacity. For DDS-described files, I usually set some maximum number of records, as 10,000 seems ridiculously low. Now that you have mentioned SQL described tables, which I

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• Specify SQL Table-creation Library at Runtime

  April 25, 2012 Hey, Ted

  I have an RPG programs that creates work tables in QTEMP. I’d like to be able to specify the library at runtime. I tried using a host variable for the library in a CREATE TABLE command, but that didn’t fly. I am using the system naming convention. Can you help? –Ben I wish CREATE TABLE would allow a host variable for the explicit qualifier, but it doesn’t. Here are a few ways that work. 1. Use dynamic SQL. Embed the library name in the SQL command. D SqlCommand s 256a varying D WorkLib s 10a /free *inlr = *on; SqlCommand

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• Getting PC5250 F1-F24 Keys to Work Correctly on HP Laptops

  April 25, 2012 Joe Hertvik

  Today’s tip comes from my own experience with a recent model HP Pavilion laptop that I use for my business. The problem occurred when I loaded up the PC5250 emulator software that comes with System i Access for Windows V6R1M0. I attached to and signed on to my production IBM i box with PC5250, executed a green-screen command, and hit the F3 key to exit the screen. Nothing happened. The F3 key didn’t work. Neither did F5, F10, F12, or any other F-key from F1 all the way up to F24. My PC5250 F-keys were dead. Experimenting with different keystroke

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• SAP Fleshes Out HANA’s Roadmap with Heavy Dose of Sybase

  April 25, 2012 Alex Woodie

  SAP last week announced additional details of the roadmap for HANA, the in-memory database technology that the German ERP software giant is currently using for business intelligence workloads. Not surprisingly, the plans calls for HANA to become the underlying database powering everyday business transactions in the SAP Business Suite, not just analytic workloads. But before then, SAP’s Sybase database will play a bigger role. SAP executives have not been shy about telling the world about their grand plans for HANA, which has become an exceptionally popular product for SAP since the company started selling it less than a year ago

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• Key Info Wins Award for IBM i Video

  April 25, 2012 Alex Woodie

  Key Information Solutions has won an award from IBM for a video about how it helped recycling company Recology implement an IBM i application that helps it achieve its mission of reducing waste in San Francisco. Recology has contracts with the City by the Bay to collect recyclable materials from homes and businesses. Every week day, fleets of Recology trucks span out across the hilly town, picking up used bottles, cans, paper, and vegetable material and food scraps. The trucks haul the materials back to Recology’s sorting plant, where it is turned back into 16 different raw materials that are

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