• Meet Watson, Rommety, And The New IBM

  February 20, 2017 Dan Burger

  Cognitive computing. What’s it mean? It means business. And it means change. The business world is changing. And IBM is changing. It’s the future, but it’s also the present. It’s happening now. Google and Microsoft are chasing the same vision of a data-driven world that is so complex that artificial intelligence is the only way to make sense of it.

  At IBM’s PartnerWorld conference last week, cognitive computing was all business. Of course, PartnerWorld is always about business and technology and getting onboard before all the best seats are taken. There’s always the proven versus the prediction.

  When does cognitive …

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• Why You Should Hire An IBM i Database Engineer

  February 15, 2017 Alex Woodie

  You likely know the IBM i platform as an all-in-one, self-contained bundle of computational glory and efficiency that doesn’t need an army of specialists to run like the platforms from “those other guys” do, thankyouverymuch. While that largely continues to be the case, you may consider making one exception for a certain type of technical expert: the database engineer.

  There’s a growing chorus coming out of IBM Rochester that IBM i shops should consider hiring database engineers, or DBEs. Folks like Alison Butterill, the product offering manager for the IBM i server, DB2 for i Business Architect Scott Forstie, …

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• Like Your Data Access? ProData Gives A Reason To Like It Better

  February 15, 2017 Dan Burger

  It’s crunch time and the IBM i staff is feeling the pressure. It’s time to step up your information retrieval game. In your tool box is the DBU Database Utility. Is this the right tool for your job? It is if your goal is to access data without writing programs. DBU tracks changes (adds and deletes). It also tracks all the views of company data. And it can be accomplished via green-screen, RDi, or Web interfaces.

  The Web interface for DBU Database Utility is called DBU Web. The software, designed and marketed by ProData Computer Services, was introduced in …

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• Shield Finds Success Through Simplicity With HA4i

  February 15, 2017 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that have shied away from implementing high availability software due the high level of complexity may want to take another look at the market. One HA vendor that’s finding traction with its message of simplicity is Shield Advanced Solutions, which has about 100 customers of its C-based HA4i product.

  High availability doesn’t have to be rocket science, according to Shield CEO Chris Hird, who has been navigating the HA waters since his early days selling MIMIX for IBM in the United Kingdom during the 1990s, before MIMIX was acquired by Lakeview Technology (now part of Vision …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, February 15

  February 15, 2017 Dan Burger

  At the top of the top stories list this week is an article that imagines programming as the skilled labor that can revive the job market in the United States. It doesn’t take a big stretch of the imagination to see that. Artificial intelligence and cognitive computing may obsolete some jobs, but Watson can’t out code a good coder.

  As long as we’re talking about cognitive, did you hear about the patents IBM collected this year directly related to cognitive computing? You couldn’t count them using all your fingers . . . even with 200 of your friends helping out …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 19, Number 6

  February 15, 2017 Doug Bidwell

  Every two weeks, IBM updates the High Impact and Pervasive, or HIPER, PTFs that are so critical to the system that in Big Blue’s opinion they should be on every system as quickly as possible. In general, any HIPER PTF that affects any operating system releases is fixed as long as support for that IBM i release is still on support.

  In the example below, from this week, the three problems are fixed on all three current IBM releases, that being 7.1, 7.2, and 7.3. The interesting part here is that OpenSSH 6.9 is vulnerable and that vulnerability is fixed …

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• More Insight Into The Rumored Power Mini System

  February 13, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Back in the day, when IBM wanted to get customers to move ahead to new iron and the Moore’s Law increases in processing capacity meant that it needed to gear down boxes to bring customers forward, IBM actually did something about it and offered a cut-down machines with lower – and competitive – prices.

  Remember the AS/400 Model 150 machines launched two decades ago, and then the breakthrough “Invader” AS/400 Model 170 machines, using the “Apache” and then “Northstar” PowerPC processors that followed them in 1998 and 1999? These systems, in a very real sense, saved the AS/400 business. Back …

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• Unwinding Python’s Data Science Potential On IBM i

  February 13, 2017 Alex Woodie

  There’s a revolution occurring in the world of big data analytics and data science at the moment, and Python is playing a starring role. Python is one of the languages that IBM has brought to the IBM i platform, so that’s clearly a good thing for midrange shops. But is enough being done to grow Python’s potential on IBM i? The answer to that question is not clear.

  Python was originally conceived by Guido van Rossum as a “hobby” programming language to keep him busy over the 1989 Christmas break. “My office. . .would be closed, but I had a …

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• Guru: SQL PL Labels

  February 13, 2017 Ted Holt

  SQL PL, the powerful, easy-to-learn procedural database language that IBM ships with all versions of DB2, allows you to identify any executable statement or compound statement with a label. I can’t think of a better day than today for us to think about why we might want to do that.

  As a minimalist programmer, I avoid useless code, and that includes unnecessary labels. In the following paragraphs, I will list only the cases that require labels.

  But first, a few ground rules.

  • As with CL, a label name is followed by a colon when used to identify a statement.

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• Mad Dog 21/21: The Next (And Maybe Last) Mainframe

  February 13, 2017 Hesh Wiener

  For the past several mainframe generations IBM has announced new large systems about every three years. The current line of big iron, the System z13, emerged in 2015, so it wouldn’t surprise anyone if the z14 or whatever it is called reaches customers next year, in 2018. Meanwhile, this year Ginni Rometty turns 60, IBM’s traditional CEO retirement age, and, like her predecessor, she could stick around one more year as the company’s chairman.

  The upshot: Rometty’s successor as CEO will enjoy the sales boost of a fresh mainframe product cycle. And if IBM is making money …

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