• RPG Summit to Emphasize Mobile Apps this Fall

  June 27, 2011 Dan Burger

  Mobile applications are a hot topic today and looking like an even hotter topic next week, next month, and into the foreseeable future. A good indicator of that is the attention given to this topic at the upcoming RPG and DB2 Summit, the bi-annual conference that emphasizes modern IBM i development topics. It was just announced last week that the fall Summit would take place October 17 through 19 in St. Louis, Missouri. “The first time we did a session on mobile computing maybe seven or eight people sat in on it,” says Paul Tuohy, one of the principle

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• IBM Adds Disaster Recovery, Archiving to SmartClouds

  June 27, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The independent software vendors making backup, recovery, and high availability software and their service providers who are moving out onto the Internet to offer remote disaster recovery and arching services to SMB data centers just got some pretty tough competition: IBM. IBM launched its SmartCloud public infrastructure cloud back in April, based on X64 servers and VMware‘s ESX Server hypervisor. IBM’s earlier test and development SmartCloud was based on Red Hat‘s KVM hypervisor, and Red Hat sources tell me that the SmartCloud public cloud will also support KVM at some point. The fact that IBM’s SmartCloud public

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• SQL Implicit Cast of Character Strings and Numeric Values

  June 22, 2011 Skip Marchesani

  Awhile back I was teaching an SQL class in Fargo, North Dakota. During one of the afternoon lab sessions, one of the students asked if he could use the CONCAT function on two numbers, or two numeric columns, without first casting them to character values. I knew the answer was “No”, and that the numeric values had to be cast to character first before the student concatenated them together. Instead of just giving the student the answer, I played good teacher and I told the student to try it and let me know how it worked. Imaging my surprise when

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• Forcing Keyword Parameters

  June 22, 2011 Ted Holt

  Programming languages use two conventions for passing arguments (commonly referred to as parameters) to a called routine. Some languages use positional parameters. That is, the parameters must be passed to the routine in a certain order. The other (and less error-prone) method is to password parameters in keyword format. IBM i allows you to force callers to use keyword format–to a point–when they use your CL commands. Here’s how. But first, let’s review the two major problems inherent in positional parameters. First, it is easy to get a parameter value into the wrong position. Take the following OCL command for

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• Admin Alert: Things to Think About in a Power i Development Environment

  June 22, 2011 Joe Hertvik

  Working in both public and private companies during my career, I’ve been subjected to my share of IT audits. My impression is that while auditors are usually very savvy about your production environment, there are other issues that maybe they should be looking at but don’t. If your production environment is in tip-top shape, audit-wise, here are some other things you might consider looking at to avoid trouble. Why Aren’t Auditors More Interested in Development Environment Infrastructure? Not to give anyone ideas, but I’ve always wondered why auditors don’t investigate development environments as seriously as they audit production environments. After

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• You’re Only As Old As The Programs You Run With

  June 20, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  How does a venerable computer system act its age? Cleverly, I think, and only when asked to. The AS/400, which has had more names than James Garner in The Rockford Files, is still the AS/400 or “the 400” to most of us despite all the pressure of political correctness to adopt the IBM i name for the operating system and to not talk about the hardware platform as anything but a Power Systems platform. As if any old operating system is as good as any other. The truly wonderful thing about that AS/400, which celebrates its 8,400th day as

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• KS2 Expands IBM i Managed Services Biz Into Hosting, Co-Lo

  June 20, 2011 Alex Woodie

  KS2 Technologies, an IBM reseller based near Dallas, is expanding its managed services business into server co-location and hosting, the company announced last week. Under the new plans, KS2 will manage the complete IBM i environment for its customers, and even house the IBM i server in one of its data centers. KS2 has been in the AS/400 business since it was founded in 1992. About seven years ago, the Grapevine, Texas, company–which is a premier IBM business partner and a member of Arrow Electronics‘ distribution channel–began its JD Edwards practice. Today about 60 percent of KS2’s customers

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• DB2 for i: The Beating Heart of the IBM i Platform

  June 20, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  One of the things I like about Steve Will, the new chief IBM i architect, is that he likes data as much as the rest of us do. When he gives a presentation about the IBM i platform and the Power Systems servers that it runs upon, he isn’t afraid to give you arts and charts and actual information to make a point. And so it is in a recent series of presentations that Will has been giving to the AS/400 faithful regarding IBM i roadmaps and other things. We’ve gone through the roadmaps and the new process for updating

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• As I See It: Nostalgic for Normal

  June 20, 2011 Victor Rozek

  “To be normal is the ideal aim of the unsuccessful.” At least that was psychologist Carl Jung’s dismissive opinion. For something that is hard to define, “normal” gets a bad rap. It’s like being average: everyone wants to be thought of as above average, but not if it means being abnormal. What’s considered normal may simply be a matter of numbers and context. If enough people buy a pink car, we become a pink car nation. If pink cars become obsolete, the next mode of popular transportation becomes normal. Then there are sub-groups that contextually delineate normality. If you’re wealthy,

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• Survey Says: 24 Hours Is The Disaster Recovery Target

  June 20, 2011 Dan Burger

  Disasters make great news. We read and watch these reports of tornados and floods and earthquakes and tsunamis, but even if we take the time to consider what we’d do if a disaster crashed into our lives, those thoughts are fleeting. We settle back into our routines and wait for the next report of a disaster that doesn’t directly affect us. Most IT departments are run with this same attitude. So it was with equal parts amusement and dismay that I examined a survey of IBM i shops conducted by United Computer Group. UCG is a provider of online

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