The IT Jungle

IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Number 26

July 8, 2019 Doug Bidwell

All of us at IT Jungle like to support our local user groups, and being from Southern California, the IBM i PTF Guide has a soft spot in its heart for the annual OCEAN technical conference. This is just a reminder that if you are in our neck of the woods, the OCEAN TechCon19 IBM i Technical Conference – check out CODE LEARN20 – runs from July 25 through 27.

Turning back to the IBM i PTF Guide, there is a new High Availability Group for 7.4, and updates for MQ for IBM i – v7.1.0/v8.0.0/V9.0.0 for IBM i …
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How Big Blue Stacks Up IBM i On Premises And On Cloud

June 24, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Here’s the $64,000 question: How much more does a slice of the IBM Cloud running IBM i cost compared to buying an on-premises machine with the same rough amount of capacity and installing IBM i on it and putting it into production? The answer to that question is: That all depends. But in general, as is the case with all infrastructures available on premises and on the cloud, the cloud is always more expensive.

This is not a surprise if you think about it for a moment. By using cloudy infrastructure, you are offloading the hassle of maintaining hardware and …
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ARCAD Brings Traditional 5250 Development Into DevOps Fold

June 24, 2019 Alex Woodie

IBM i developers who embrace modern DevOps techniques typically also use modern development tools, like RDi. Much of the IBM i world uses IBM’s latest development environment, but many have resisted. Now, thanks to new software from ARCAD Software, IBM i developers who work with older tools like PDM can also partake of the benefits of DevOps.

Getting older IBM i developers on board with the latest tools and techniques is a big priority for ARCAD Software, according to Alexandre Codinach, vice president of Americas for ARCAD Software, which included the new 5250 development capabilities with the launch of …
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Guru: When %SCAN Isn’t Sufficient

June 24, 2019 Ted Holt

The RPG %SCAN built-in function is wonderful! I can still remember having to look for a string within a string using RPG II on System/36. What an ordeal that was! Yet in some situations %SCAN can’t do all I need it to do. In those cases, I rely on the power of SQL.

One case where SQL comes in handy is when I need a case-insensitive scan. Instead of RPG’s %SCAN function, I use SQL’s LOCATE and UPPER functions, like this:
```
dcl-s  Description  char(48);
dcl-s  pos          int (10);

exec sql
   set :pos = locate ('HAMMER', upper(:Description));
```
If Description has the …
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Four Hundred Monitor, June 24

June 24, 2019 Jenny Thomas

There was a lot of excitement in the world of IBM i last week. Last Friday, June 21, marked the 31^st birthday of the IBM i. But you may have forgotten to celebrate because it also marked the release of IBM i 7.4. We have been writing about the coming 7.4 enhancements for weeks in The Four Hundred, and you can continue to follow us for the latest news as the rollout continues. For now, check out all the latest news and happenings around our industry at the links below, and don’t forget to check the calendar for …
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IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Number 25

June 24, 2019 Doug Bidwell

First of all, Happy 31st Birthday to the AS/400, which had its anniversary on June 21 when, absolutely not coincidentally, Big Blue shipped the latest and greatest IBM i 7.4 release of its operating system for the Power Systems platform. We have all been eagerly awaiting this new release because of the many new features it has, and we are just beginning to sink our teeth into it.

For your reference, I upgraded a system running IBM i 7.3 to IBM i 7.4 as soon as the new release was available, and just so you know, all the Java licensed …
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Guru Classic: Looking For Commitment, Part 1

June 19, 2019 Paul Tuohy

Author’s Note: This set of three articles was originally published in March of 2009. (See links in Related Stories below). As companies look to modernizing their applications, commitment control can play an integral role. In my next three Guru Classic articles, I will be updating the content of these articles for free-form RPG.

In this article, I will discuss what commitment control is, why you may want to use it, and the basic requirements for commitment control. In subsequent articles, I will look more closely at how commitment control works, different ways in which it can be implemented, …
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Guru Classic: Giving RDi a Split Personality

June 19, 2019 Susan Gantner

A commonly asked question by RDi newbies is: “How do I view source in split screen like I can in SEU?” The answer is that you can’t do it exactly like SEU, but then why would you want to? The RDi editor offers far greater flexibility.

The original version of my tip on this subject was published back in 2007. Back then, the toolset we know as RDi was called “WDSC”. Quite a lot of other changes have occurred within RDi as well. Originally, a specialized perspective was required to make this feature work well. Today’s RDi works well without …
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Guru Classic: Where Does Data Live? The New Basics

June 19, 2019 Jon Paris

Every time I teach some of the more recent additions to RPG, such as XML parsing or Open Access, I find that I need to include some “remedial” education on some of the data definition enhancements that have been made to the language over recent releases.

Most of these enhancements came into the language many years ago back in the days when D-specs were de rigueur, but if you had no immediate need for them, they may have passed you by. After all, even the most avid reader of this newsletter has probably forgotten most of what they read here …
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Pricing Revealed For IBM i Slices On IBM Cloud

June 17, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Today is the day. You can finally go out onto the IBM i Cloud and buy on-demand slices of Power-based systems from Big Blue itself and load up the IBM i operating system and integrated database and do actual work on it. And, if it floats your boat, you can run AIX partitions on the IBM Cloud, too, on the same Power S922 and Power E880 iron that IBM is making available and carving up with its homegrown PowerVM server virtualization hypervisor.

IBM revealed its plans for IBM i and AIX on its own public cloud, called the Power …
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