The IT Jungle

IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 28, Number 9

March 2, 2026 Doug Bidwell

Welcome to March. You have five security vulnerabilities to take care of. The good news is that there is not a lot of other PTF stuff you have to worry about if you are on IBM i 7.3 through IBM i 7.6. There are Group HIPER and Group Security updates for IBM i 7.2, which is still under extended support.

Let’s go through the security vulnerabilities to start, as we usually do.

First, we have Security Bulletin: IBM Rational Developer for i is affected by a memory exhaustion loop (CVE-2024-4068), which you can read about here. (And for …
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After A Few Short Years, VS Code Passes Rational Developer for i

February 23, 2026 Alex Woodie

It has finally happened: Visual Studio Code has passed Rational Developer for i in usage, according to the 2026 version of Fortra’s IBM i Marketplace Survey. The survey also shows lower adoption of greenscreen ADTS and increased use of DevOps tools, demonstrating some positive trends in IBM i application development.

It’s been barely two years since Fortra started asking IBM i customers about their use of Visual Studio Code, the free, Web-based integrated development environment (IDE) originally developed by Microsoft and set free as an open source project in November 2015. The 2024 survey (which was conducted in late 2023) …
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Why Logical Replication Has Become The New Standard for IBM i HA/DR

February 23, 2026 Ash Giddings

In IBM i environments, data is not simply something applications use. For many organizations, particularly in manufacturing, finance, distribution, retail, and government, the data is the business. Orders, invoices, inventory positions, compliance records, and customer histories exist nowhere else. If that data is unavailable, inconsistent, or unrecoverable, the business does not just suffer a slowdown. It stops.

This reality has always been understood within the IBM i community. What has changed is the level of assurance now expected around data protection, recoverability, and governance. High availability and disaster recovery are no longer judged by whether data is replicated, but by …
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Guru: Managing The Lifecycle Of Your Service Programs – Updates Without Chaos

February 23, 2026 Gregory Simmons

You’ve written your service programs, organized your modules, picked your activation groups, and maybe even set up a tidy binding directory. Everything seems perfect – until someone needs to update a procedure that half the shop’s programs depend on. Suddenly, that tidy structure can feel like a trap. Welcome to the reality of service program lifecycle management.

The key principle here is simple: change with care. Any update to a service program can ripple across every program bound to it. Without a strategy, you’ll find yourself fielding calls about broken reports, failed jobs, or, worst of all, subtle logic errors …
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IT Spending Forecast Keeps Going Up And Up, But It Won’t Go Away

February 23, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Every time we turn around, the hyperscalers, cloud builders, and model builders slap down a couple 10 billion dollars in incremental spending on AI systems to fulfill their GenAI dreams, and all the market researchers have to pull out their models and have another whack at trying to case what will be spent in the coming years. This also gives them another chance to tweak their estimates for spending in the prior year, if it needs updating.

The forecasting wizards at Gartner have just released a revised spending breakdown for 2025 and – surprise, surprise! – an upwardly revised forecast …
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IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 28, Number 8

February 23, 2026 Doug Bidwell

This week, we start with three security vulnerabilities and a warning about media issues when you put your external LTO drives too close to the running Power Systems iron in your rack.

Let’s start with the vulnerabilities, as we often do.

First, we have Security Bulletin: IBM i is affected by denial of service vulnerabilities in Db2 JSON Store Technology Preview [CVE-2025-66453], which you can read more about here. The fixes for this vulnerability are as follows:
```
IBM i Release	PTF Number(s)
7.4	SJ08547
7.3	SJ08546
7.2	SJ08545
```
Second, we have IBM i Java Development Kit 8 64 & …
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It’s Time To Get An Offsite Data Protection Strategy

February 23, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

We have nothing against tape cartridges, tape drives, and tape libraries large and small. There is absolutely nothing wrong with keeping tapes in an underground vault very far away from floods, winds, fire, and cosmic radiation. Which is why tape somewhere around 200 exabytes of LTO tape drive capacity was sold last year, and it is why tape drives and libraries comprise somewhere around 10 percent of the $50 billion to $60 billion of enterprise storage – meaning flash, disk, and tape media devices – sold each year.

Big Blue invented the IBM 726 tape drive in 1952, which was …
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Where We Are And Where We Are Headed With AI On IBM i

February 16, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Here we are in 2026, and we have gotten used to GenAI like we did the coronavirus pandemic after it largely ran its course after three years. The difference, of course, is that there is no vaccine for GenAI, especially when a substantial part of the growth in the global economy is coming from enormous capital spending on GenAI hardware and software.

I have spent a large portion of my career as an IT journalist and analyst tracking high end, large scale, distributed computing in its many forms and have been fascinated by the clever and creative advances in the …
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IBM Unveils Expert Query To Replace Db2 Web Query

February 16, 2026 Alex Woodie

IBM’s Technology Expert Labs is launching IBM Database Expert Query for i, a new tool that allows users to create and run reports against the integrated Db2 for i database from the comfort of a Web browser. IBM is positioning Expert Query as a replacement for Db2 Web Query, the business intelligence and analytics tool that it abruptly killed more than two years ago.

Expert Query was developed over the past year by Technology Expert Labs (formerly Lab Services). We have heard rumblings that Big Blue was gearing up a replacement for the well-liked Db2 Web Query product, and it …
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Guru: Are Binding Directories A Shortcut Or A Source Of Chaos?

February 16, 2026 Gregory Simmons

Ask any IBM i developer about binding directories, and you will usually get one of two reactions: A grateful nod or an eye roll. For some, binding directories are a lifesaver, making compile commands cleaner and projects easier to manage. For others, they are a ticking time bomb, introducing hidden dependencies that come back to haunt you months later.

I have seen both sides. In fact, one of the worst compile-day disasters I’ve witnessed started with a well-meaning developer adding a single service program to a global binding directory. Suddenly, half the shop’s programs were linking against the wrong version …
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