• There’s Always A New Last Laugh With Legacy

  January 13, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  On my bookshelf beside my desk is a shelf that has all of my relevant AS/400 books and copies of the first decade of The Four Hundred, back when it was a monthly newsletter printed on paper. Sometimes, when I get stuck for ideas, I page through my history and yours, and I am often amazed at the wealth of information that myself and my colleagues – as well as many, many sources – helps us to create. AS/400s were a lot more expensive than IBM i machines, and helping people save money was our primary mission, and there …

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• SAP Sending Mixed Messages On ERP Platform Support

  January 13, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Thousands of SAP Business Suite customers around the world are awaiting clarification from the German software giant about whether their chosen ERP software will continue to run on their chosen platform in five years. SAP is strongly hinting that it may move forward just with S/4 HANA, which at the moment is a Linux-only affair. But its actions suggest a more diverse array of databases and operating systems may be accommodated in the future.

  Questions about SAP’s intentions originated with a statement it made in 2014. At that time, SAP announced that it would fully support its current flagship …

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• Guru: Formatting Numbers and Dates/Times/Timestamps in SQL

  January 13, 2020 Paul Tuohy

  In this article, I want to share with you an SQL scalar function that I happen to have been using quite a bit recently. At times, when using an SQL select statement, you may want to format a number or date. Something along the same lines as using the %EDITC or %EDITW built in functions in RPG or the EDTCDE or EDTWRD keywords in DDS. In SQL we can use the VARCHAR_FORMAT or TO_CHAR (they are synonyms for each other – both work exactly the same way) scalar function to provide similar functionality.

  Since they are synonyms for each other, …

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• As I See It: Digital Trafficking

  January 13, 2020 Victor Rozek

  The Constitution and the Bill of Rights contain many fine words but “privacy” is not among them. At best the right to privacy is implied in the 4th Amendment, which protects against unreasonable search and seizure, and the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment that protects against the arbitrary denial of life, liberty, or property.

  One would think that the systematic and deliberate tracking of our movements would constitute an unreasonable search and seizure or, at the very least, an infringement on our liberty. But the founding fathers could not have conceived of a technology that digitized human beings …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 22, Number 1

  January 13, 2020 Doug Bidwell

  We want to remind you once again about the LPARs that are hanging on machines that have the latest Technology Refreshes applied to IBM i 7.3 and IBM i 7.4 in cases where the Hardware Management Console (HMC) is not managing the partitions. The details of the issue with the Technology Refreshes are outlined in APAR MA48101, which is essentially a bug report that warns customers of an issue with the software stack and oftentimes gives hints about when and how it will be fixed.

  Here is the issue in a nutshell: IPL-SRCC6003962-WAIT Hang with IBM i 7.3 with …

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• Participate In The 2020 IBM i Marketplace Survey Webcast

  January 13, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Every fall for the past six years, HelpSystems puts out the call for the IBM i community to participate in its annual survey of the base so we can find out what is going on out there in your shops. And then as the new year just gets going, the company hosts a webinar that goes over the results of the survey with commentary from a bunch of people.

  Tom Huntington, the executive vice president of technical solutions at HelpSystems, will host the webinar, and I plan to attend as do two familiar IBMers and a new one. That would …

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• Guru Classic: iSphere Plug-in Expands RSE/RDi Toolset

  January 8, 2020 Susan Gantner

  My series of three Guru tips on the free iSphere plug-in first appeared in 2015. Since I still find that most RDi users haven’t heard of it, I’ve decided to repeat the series as Guru Classics. I’ve made a few updates to this first one in the series due to enhancements made to both RDi and iSphere in the intervening years.

  Followers of my Guru tips know that I’m a big RDi fan. These days I would be lost trying to write or maintain RPG code without things like RDi’s Outline, Error feedback, editor filtering, and Undo. But you know …

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• Guru Classic: A Bevy Of BIFs – %ScanRpl (Scan And Replace)

  January 8, 2020 Jon Paris

  This gem of a BIF was introduced with the V7.1 release and so was not available some five years ago when I wrote my original Bevy series of tips. Now that most active development shops are running V7.1 and later it seems a good candidate for a “Classic” to remind readers of its capabilities. The intervening years have not dimmed its utility and it remains one of my all-time favorite BIFs.

  Simply put, %ScanRpl will search a target string for a given character sequence and replace it with another. Not only that but it will then continue to search through …

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• Guru Classic: Don’t Ignore the View

  January 8, 2020 Paul Tuohy

  Author’s Note: This article was originally published in April 2009. The use of DDL and embedded SQL have come a long way since then but the basic premise of the article still applies. I have removed the embedded SQL example using a SELECT * since this is a style that I no longer recommend (from the point of view of self-documenting code, possible performance gains and breaking old habits of thinking in records). I also changed the example of reformatting a numeric date column to use a DATES table as opposed to functions (a faster and better approach). I removed …

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• Observations, Priorities, And Desires For IBM i In 2020

  January 6, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With age and wisdom comes a certain kind of calm expectation that does not necessarily put one in the frame of mind to make prognostications as much as making some observations, laying out priorities, and expressing desires. Making predictions is really about placing qualified and intelligent bets, more like hunting than the slower, measured pace of agriculture, which is about planning and fostering growth.

  As I approach the new decade, I am less in the mood to don my wizard hat with its moons and stars on it and to rub the dust off the crystal ball on my desk …

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