• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 19, Numbers 13 And 14

  April 19, 2017 Doug Bidwell

  IT Jungle took a hiatus with the Wednesday edition of The Four Hundred last week, so this week we are publishing two issues of the IBM i PTF Guide at the same time.

  In Volume 19, Number 14, Content Manager was the only new group with fixes during the week, so there was not much happening in the world of PTFs ahead of the Easter holiday. (And probably for that very reason.) When this happens – the “doldrums of fixes” – it generally means that there will be a deluge in the near future. We would like to urge you …

  Read more

• IBM Gives AIX Some Of The Integration Spice Of IBM i

  April 17, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Sometimes I just have to laugh. One of the best things about the IBM i platform, and the thing that truly separates it aside from its sophisticated single memory storage architecture is the fact that it is an integrated system that is easy to deploy and even easier to administer. So many functions of the system are automated that companies that don’t want to hire database experts can do a very good job of coding applications and running their business with far fewer techies than other platforms require.

  The same has never been said of AIX, and it certainly cannot …

  Read more

• Secrets Of IBM i Magic Act Revealed

  April 17, 2017 Dan Burger

  Can IBM i shops find a way to replace their RPG-oriented staffs with magicians? The answer, in many cases, is that they already have. The RPG staff members are the magicians. They’ve abra-ka-dabra-ed their way to doing more with less for something like 30 years. The clever companies employing these magicians have parlayed this IT staff magic into new technology investments that perpetuate the more for less phenomenon.

  One of those technologies is the modern managed services provider, which causes system management to disappear and gives the IT magicians something new to work on . . . like database modernization, …

  Read more

• Guru: SQL Facts Of UNION And ORDER BY, Take Two

  April 17, 2017 Ted Holt

  Hey, Ted:

  In last week’s tip, you mentioned that expressions are not allowed in the ORDER BY clause of a union. You can use the union as a subquery to allow the use of an expression for the ordering. An extra layer, but it gives you the result you are looking for.

  –S. Sims

  Sims is correct. I was so focused on the fact that the ORDER BY of a union does not allow expressions that I completely forgot about a workaround. His (her?) technique is probably the most common way to deal with this limitation. I’ve seen numerous examples …

  Read more

• S4i Systems Embraces Open Source Project

  April 17, 2017 Dan Burger

  Open source development on IBM i bodes well for the platform and all those who look to the future as well as recognizing the value of the past. RPG development isn’t threatened by open source options. It’s stimulated by open source. The modernization of RPG, C, or COBOL investments gets a boost from open source. There are people writing applications on IBM i that would not be within shouting distance of the platform if open source language options were not available.

  When Web services, mobile applications and other Web technologies become more closely aligned with i, the community benefits. The …

  Read more

• Taking A New Look At Used IBM i Gear

  April 17, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In some ways, we miss the days when OS/400 and IBM i gear was more expensive than it is today. Thanks to considerably larger customer and reseller bases and because hardware was so expensive and, costing something on the order of a few mansions per month to rent or lease or finance, there was a vibrant market in second-hand AS/400 and iSeries equipment.

  But as the base got smaller and systems got cheaper thanks to Moore’s Law improvements on all hardware components except the tin wrapping around them, the market for used equipment became thinner and less orderly. And, perhaps …

  Read more

• Why Is IBM Giving AIX Shops Better Deals Than IBM i Shops?

  April 10, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It looks like AIX shops got a better Valentine’s Day card than IBM i customers did.

  One of the things that was supposed to happen when the iSeries and pSeries product lines were merged back in 2000 was that a unified Power Systems organization was going to run both the OS/400 (now IBM i) and AIX software platforms on a single, unified hardware platform with a single and equal hardware price. This was something we had been demanding from IBM so long that we were blue in the face, so to speak, and to its credit, IBM stuck to the …

  Read more

• SQL To The Rescue

  April 10, 2017 Bob Cozzi

  Since the early 1990s, developers have been using SQL embedded in RPG as a way to retrieve just the right data for the task at hand. Certainly it was at least a decade before it became commonplace to see SQL embedded in RPG, but now, 15 years later, it is in fact the go-to method for data access, or at least you can see it from here.

  I was an early adopter of SQL, but an off-again, on-again user of embedded SQL. Originally, I felt the first format RPG with quasi-free format SQL (and all those plus signs to continue …

  Read more

• Guru: SQL Facts Of UNION And ORDER BY

  April 10, 2017 Ted Holt

  UNION and ORDER BY are powerful SQL features, but put the two together and you may get some strange and frustrating error messages. Fortunately for us DB2 for i professionals, there are easy ways to make the two collaborate and cooperate. Today is a great day to be sure we understand them.

  We need some data for examples. For some of the queries, I use a customer master table (file) and a vendor master table. These are a company’s trading partners, so the two have many attributes in common, especially names and addresses. I also use two sales history tables, …

  Read more

• Blockchain: A Link In Your Long Term IBM i Plan

  April 10, 2017 Dan Burger

  In general, the IBM i community gets derogatorily tagged with having minimal tolerance for risk. Having little appetite for risk isn’t such a bad thing when the failure rate for implementing a new technology – namely blockchain – in a business environment falls just short of a sure bet. Gartner predicts that 90 percent of the enterprise blockchain projects launched in 2016 and the first half of 2017 will crash and burn within two years.

  Sounds like the kind of risk anyone would like to avoid. So why should you care about blockchain? No bandwagon recommendations, but some blockchain awareness …

  Read more

Previous Articles Next Articles