• Four Hundred Monitor, February 26

  February 26, 2020 Jenny Thomas

  February may be the shortest month but sometimes it feels like is might be the longest. That could be because news on the computing front has been a bit slow in the last few weeks as we are getting ready for the announcements that come along with the Spring conference season. As February wraps up, we have a smattering of news to share from around our community, and we hope you’ll be sure to check out the growing list of Chats, Webinars, Seminars, Shows, and Other Happenings in the last section below, where the news is sure to be happening. …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 22, Number 8

  February 26, 2020 Doug Bidwell

  We are back in synch again this week with the IBM i PTF Guide, and I am going to offer you a bit of personal advice just to get things going: Drink lots of water, every day. You will not regret it later in your life, trust me on that one. Coffee and tea and beer and wine don’t count nearly as much as cool, clear, clean tap water. Maybe herbal tea is alright.

  Now, let’s get on with the rundown by IBM i release:

  PTF Groups 7.4

  • Backup Recovery Solutions

  PTF Groups 7.3

  • Backup Recovery Solutions

  PTF …

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• How SAP HANA Helps Keep IBM i Strong

  February 24, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It has been a good 12 months for Power Systems in the cloud. Not only did Big Blue launch entry Power8 and high-end Power8 machines on its IBM Cloud supporting IBM i and AIX and promise to get high-end Power9 iron on its cloud as well, but Google, Skytap, and Microsoft also launched Power9 iron on their respective public cloud and offered to run Linux, AIX, and IBM i on these machines. Last week, it was the turn for enterprise software giant SAP, which is adding high-end Power E980 systems to its own cloud services so customers can run HANA …

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• A Lifeline For CIOs, The Toughest Job In IT

  February 24, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Let’s hear it for chief information officers, who have the toughest jobs in IT. If you’re good enough and lucky enough to succeed with your initiatives, you get to keep your job another year. But if the plans fall through, then you’re out on the curb. It’s a lonely job, but thanks to the CIO Summit event that Alan Seiden puts on with System i Developer, the CIOs at IBM i shops at least have a lifeline for support.

  Research shows that CIOs have among the shortest tenures of any position in the C-suite. The management consulting firm Korn Ferry …

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• Guru: Alternate SQL Row-Selection Criteria Revisited

  February 24, 2020 Ted Holt

  At the RPG & DB2 Summit last October, I chanced to overhear Rob Bestgen of IBM telling Paul Tuohy of System i Developer about a practice that he and others in IBM Lab Services had seen, a practice which they found horrifying. “Oh, no!” I thought. “I’ve written about that for itjungle.com!” Are you ready to be horrified?

  Rob was telling Paul that they have seen SQL queries in which portions of the WHERE clause are enabled or disabled through the use of switches. I did not invent this technique — I realized more than a few years ago that …

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• As I See It: Digitally Enhanced Loneliness

  February 24, 2020 Victor Rozek

  A friend of mine was dating a woman he met on social media who became frustrated because their relationship wasn’t “deep” enough. It eventually floundered which was unfortunate because outside of his primal fear of commitment, he is basically a nice guy with extensive interests and bountiful skills. I suggested, in his defense, he explain to her that although he may not be deep, given his wide-ranging pursuits he could be thought of as shallow but wide. This apparently didn’t assuage her concerns since they are no longer together, but it is indicative of two things: The disposable nature of …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 22, Number 7

  February 24, 2020 Doug Bidwell

  In this week’s issue of the IBM i PTF Guide, we have a lot of little things and thankfully not too many big and scary things to deal with. There is not much else to say about it, so let’s just get on with it then, with the rundown by release:

  PTF Groups 7.4

  • HIPERs (High Impact/Pervasive)

  PTF Groups 7.3

  • HIPERs (High Impact/Pervasive)

  PTF Groups 7.2

  • HIPERs (High Impact/Pervasive)

  PTF Groups 7.1

  • None

  New (or Updated) Links this week:

  • IMGCLG: Image Catalog and Virtual Media – Maximum Capacities and Limitations
  • IMGCLG: CRTIMGCLG Specifying IFS Path in /QNTC Fails
  • QNTC:

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• The State Of The IBM i Installed Base, Part 2

  February 17, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In the first half of our analysis of the IBM i installed base, we looked at the number of machines and the number of logical partitions that respondents of the IBM i Marketplace Survey for the 2020 report gave last fall when they took the poll. We did some math and analysis on this to show that there is a large block of customers with lots of machines and lots of partitions that are just as important to Big Blue as those with big, fat NUMA servers.

  In the second half of this series about the state of the IBM …

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• FlashSystem In, Storwize Out After IBM Storage Shakeup

  February 17, 2020 Alex Woodie

  IBM rejiggered its storage array lineup last week when it consolidated the old Storwize arrays into the FlashSystem line and introduced several new FlashSystem offerings. Big Blue now uses NVM-Express drives almost exclusively across the FlashSystem family, which will support deployments in hybrid cloud configurations, while also offering new options for performance-enhancing storage class memory.

  Like other storage vendors have done, IBM has elected to reduce the number of product lines in an attempt to not only simplify naming conventions, but to reduce technical complexity for customers. For IBM, that means eliminating the Storwize brand by merging it into the …

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• Guru: Using Identity Columns For Complex Keys

  February 17, 2020 Paul Tuohy

  In September 2019, Ted Holt published an article that demonstrated how an identity column can be used to generate a unique key in a table. In this article, I want to expand on that theme and examine another use of an identity column — replacing complex keys.

  Using an identity column in place of a complex key makes for much faster joins between tables, as you are joining based on two numbers as opposed to values of multiple columns. Identity columns also make for joins that are easier to comprehend, since they are based on just one column. This approach …

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