• POWERUp Delivers Shot In The Arm To IBM i

  June 3, 2019 Alex Woodie

  The IBM i platform has shown some growth in recent quarters, but it nonetheless faces a plethora of headwinds when it comes to surviving, much less growing, in the coming years. It’s not X86-based, and you can’t find it in the public cloud (at least not yet). It’s definitely not new, and it’s certainly not sexy. (Maybe no server really is at this point.) But coming on the heels of the IBM i 7.4 unveiling in April, the recent POWERUp conference delivered another greatly needed boost to the IBM i community.

  You can be forgiven for thinking the worst of …

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• Speaking The SQL Lingua Franca On IBM i

  June 3, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  No matter what the job is, we all start out somewhere that is pretty far from being an expert and we depend on our elders and mentors to help us learn all the tricks and get good at the work.

  So it is with the nearly ubiquitous database query language, Structured Query Language, or SQL for short. It started out in the head of IBMer Ted Codd back in 1969, which was coincidentally when the System/3 minicomputer launched and its successor many generations later, the System/38 in 1978, was the first IBM system and the first system in the world …

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• Guru: 7.4 Brings New RPG Goodies

  June 3, 2019 Jon Paris

  As I’m sure you know by now, IBM recently announced version 7.4 of IBM i. Along with major enhancements such as Db2 Mirror, we also got a number of new RPG features. In this tip I’ll cover those that are already available in 7.3 via PTF. The 7.4-only enhancements will be covered in a subsequent tip.

  Before we get into the details of the 7.3 features, just a hint of what is to come . . . 7.4 brings the long-awaited arrival of dynamic arrays known to IBM as varying dimension arrays. No more do you have to compromise between …

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• As I See It: In The Face Of Bad Behavior

  June 3, 2019 Victor Rozek

  I can’t remember precisely what was worrying my manager that day. But as we walked down a long hallway, she expounded on some issue having to do with one of the employees under my supervision. Whatever the specific problem, she seemed more troubled than was common, and in an attempt to reassure her, I put my arm around her shoulders and said: “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it.”

  That was it. The whole incident took no more than three seconds and I thought no more about it. But months later, over a quiet cup of coffee, she shared the …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Number 21

  June 3, 2019 Doug Bidwell

  You come to the IBM i PTF Guide to find out what’s new, and I am here to tell you. First of all, there is a new PTF Group for backup and recovery, which is perhaps not very exciting but is nonetheless one of the most critical aspects of the IBM i system. We also find that the HTTP Server in IBM i 7.2 and IBM i 7.3 has security vulnerabilities.

  The relevant PTFs for the Web server fixes are:

  • 3 SI69900 & SI69828
  • 2 SI69901

  For further details check this link.

  Also, there is a new PTF Group …

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• IBM Gives A Peek Of The Future At POWERUp 2019

  May 20, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It would not be a COMMON, or even a POWERUp, conference without some glimpse into the future by IBM to give customers of its Power Systems line a sense of what lies ahead near the horizon. By doing so, Big Blue can provide comfort to customers that it is working on future technologies and services without revealing its hand too much to competitors.

  Steve Sibley, vice president of offerings for the Cognitive Systems division, which is the part of IBM that makes and sells Power Systems iron, participated in the opening session of the POWERUp 2019 conference in Anaheim on …

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• Why i Reason #87: Eschewing Performance for Its Own Sake

  May 20, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Make no mistake about it: IBM’s Power Systems server can flat out fly. The two biggest supercomputers on the planet right now – Summit and Sierra – are Power9 machines, although much of the computational oomph comes from Nvidia GPUs. But one thing that sets the IBM i server apart from its hardware compatriots is that it avoids the celebrity of performance.

  Performance is “in” right now in the IT space (it never really went out of style). Industry standard server makers (i.e., those who make X86 servers) fight over who has the fastest systems. Public cloud platforms battle to …

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• Guru: Application Tracing With The QTRC APIs

  May 20, 2019 Dawn May

  The IBM i operating system is extensively instrumented for diagnostic purposes to help IBM resolve issues should they arise. Instrumenting your application for diagnostics is also possible in a manner very similar to what IBM has done in the operating system.

  STRTRC and the QTRC APIs

  The operating system includes a trace facility called QTRC. This trace facility is a set of APIs (QTRC APIs) that allow you to instrument your application to collect trace data.  This trace data can be whatever you may find helpful for debugging applications in a production environment, where using a debugger is …

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• Do These Four Things to Avoid ERP Project Failure

  May 20, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Nobody wants to be part of an ERP project failure, but the fact is that these implementations rarely go perfectly smooth. There’s a wide spectrum of things that can go wrong in these massive projects, ranging from taking a little too long and going a smidgen over budget, to serious operational issues and even outright failure. It’s also the topic that the folks at Third Stage Consulting analyzed in a recent study.

  What makes The 2019 Digital Transportation, HCM, and ERP Report different from other reports on enterprise software implementations is the data-driven approach to understanding the deployments from quantitative …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Number 20

  May 20, 2019 Doug Bidwell

  It has been a busy week out there in the PTF generation factory at IBM, with a new cume for IBM i 7.2 (following a week after the new cume for IBM i 7.3) as well as a new HIPER Group and a new Web Query Group for all three current releases (that’s IBM i 7.1, 7.2, and 7.3).

  In this week’s issue, there are a few new or updated links in the Guide, as follows:

  • LDAP — IBM Directory Server for IBM i (LDAP)
  • SMTP — Configuring SSL Between IBM i and Remote Mail Router WITHOUT Authentication

  And …

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