• Guru: Set Beats A Loop

  August 23, 2021 Ted Holt

  Hey, Ted:

  I’m sending you some RPG source code that I put into one of our inquiry programs and would like to have your insight. Instead of using the SETLL, DOW and READE opcodes to loop through a group of selected records, I used the SQL SET statement. This seems to me much easier for someone else to understand and follow. Is this good practice?

  — Mike

  I was glad to see Mike’s email in my inbox, as always. He and I met in person at the RPG & DB2 Summit a few years ago, and I’ve enjoyed getting to …

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• The Other IBM Big Iron That Is On The Horizon

  August 23, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The Hot Chips conference is underway this week, historically at Stanford University but this year as was the case last year, is being done virtually thanks to the coronavirus pandemic. There are a lot of new chips that are being discussed in detail, and one of them is not the forthcoming Power10 chip from IBM, which is expected to make its debut sometime in September and which was one of the hot items at last year’s Hot Chips event.

  The one processor that IBM is talking about, however, is the “Telum” z16 processor for System z mainframes, and unlike …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 23, Number 34

  August 23, 2021 Doug Bidwell

  It is the middle of August and we expect for the software patches to slow down a bit, not so much because software is kind to our aspirations to have some vacation before the new season of school, harvest, and system upgrades begins anew but because frankly unless the system is on fire, no one cares about updating its operating system or related systems software in these weeks before Labor Day.

  But, there are a few things you need to be aware of. There are some new HIPERs and some new defectives this week. Let’s go to the video tape. …

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• Quest For The Hybrid Grail: Getting To A Frictionless Cloud

  August 16, 2021 Satya Sharma

  Grail quests have always been a motif in literature and entertainment, and they most always come about because of an existential threat to the heroes seeking the mystical relic. In many ways, grail quests are also equally common in the business world. Businesses have found that a highway to accelerate their quest is embracing hybrid cloud, which recent studies have shown to offer 2.5 times greater value than a public cloud only deployment. But not all hybrid cloud platforms are created equal.

  In an IDC post titled The Road to Hybrid Multicloud, the market researcher explains that “the Holy …

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• Calling All IBM i Platforms. . .

  August 16, 2021 Daniel Magid

  In a microservices world, all elements of what used to be monolithic application programs are now chunks of code linked to each other using any number of application programming interfaces, or APIs. Those APIs can be based on a remote procedure call, or RPC, architecture, which is a kind of generic distributed client/server approach, or the REST – short for representational state transfer – architecture favored by parts of the commercial Web software stack that has dramatically grown in popularity in the past two decades. Either way – and in fact, there are more than two ways – APIs are …

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• Guru: Odds and Ends

  August 16, 2021 Ted Holt

  I really appreciate the comments that readers add to the end of articles or send to me in email. The more you share, the more all of us are better off. I know that you don’t have time to go back through articles we have published to see if anyone has commented, so this week I do that for you. Please keep the feedback coming!

  Several people posted responses to Paul Tuohy’s article Getting Meaningful Audit Information from a Journal. You can read them for yourself, but I wanted to thank Emanuele, who mentioned a tool that is similar …

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• Domino 12 Comes To IBM i

  August 16, 2021 Alex Woodie

  HCL Technologies, which now owns the Lotus Notes and Domino family, started shipping Domino 12 two months ago. Surprisingly, the new version is now available on the IBM i platform, where a substantial number of companies still run Notes and Domino applications.

  Back in late 2017, you will remember, an agreement was struck between IBM and HCL Technologies regarding Notes and Domino, the groupware software that had languished on the Big Blue vine for years. HCL made development of Domino 10 a priority, and finally shipped the 10th edition of the product on IBM i in early 2019. …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 23, Number 33

  August 16, 2021 Doug Bidwell

  It is the middle of August and we expect for the software patches to slow down a bit, not so much because software is kind to our aspirations to have some vacation before the new season of school, harvest, and system upgrades begins anew, but because frankly unless the system is on fire, no one cares about updating its operating system or related systems software in these weeks before Labor Day.

  But, there are a few things you need to be aware of. There are some new HIPERs and some new defectives this week. Let’s go to the video tape. …

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• New Extension Brings IBM i Closer to VS Code

  August 11, 2021 Alex Woodie

  When it comes to integrated development environments (IDEs), Microsoft is best known for its full-featured Visual Studio offering. But many developers have grown attached to its younger, free-er, and lighter weight cousin, Visual Studio Code (VS Code). And with the new VS Code for IBM i extension recently unveiled by Liam Allan, the skinny IDE’s integration with the midrange server is getting better.

  VS Code for IBM i is an open source extension that allows developers to work with IBM i languages like RPG, COBOL, and CL within VS Code. Allan first released the product in February, but largely kept …

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• Shield Launches Message Monitoring Offering for IBM i

  August 11, 2021 Alex Woodie

  IBM i professionals should stay on top of important messages generated by their server. But sometimes can be difficult for a user to sign-in on a console. With Enterprise Monitoring Solution for IBM i, or EM4i, Shield Advanced Solutions is giving operators and administrators the capability to view messages and log files remotely via email, text, or push notifications, and to respond to them, too.

  EM4i monitors IBM i message queues and job logs on behalf of the user. When a message hits the log, EM4i automatically forwards it to the user as email, text, or via Pushover Notification, …

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