• VAI Teams With Forward Thinking For GPS Truck Tracking

  November 30, 2016 Dan Burger

  Midsize manufacturers and distributors have unique requirements when it comes to delivering their products to market. Automation and integration of business processes are playing a big role in achieving higher efficiency. For example, there was a time when GPS tracking gathered truck location and activity data for only the largest freight hauling specialists. But now there are small and midsize manufacturers and distributors that can track their own fleets, adding a customer feature that improves satisfaction rates and provides analytics that increase efficiencies. VAI, a successful mid-market ERP software developer with IBM midrange customers in the fields of distribution,

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• Skills Shortage Prompts Fresche’s New View of X-Analysis

  November 30, 2016 Alex Woodie

  Different companies have different ways of dealing with the emerging IBM i skills shortage. Some shops may look to college grads for fresh new faces, while others may seek to retrain existing IT personnel in IBM i skills. Still others will seek to exit IBM i through wholesale migration to X86 or cloud platforms. At Fresche, the skills shortage presents an opportunity to get a well-regarded code analysis tool called X-Analysis into the hands of more people. X-Analysis, you will remember, was Fresche Legacy’s first big purchase following its 2012 name-change from Speedware. Developed by the British software

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• IBM Tweaks More Power Systems Peripherals

  November 30, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It takes a bit of time to drill down into the annual Power Systems announcements from Big Blue, which in the case of this year happened across September and October. We have told you all about the new systems, such as they are, and updated IBM i 7.2 and 7.3 software releases, as well as various other components. In this week’s installment, we are going to drill down into some of the new peripheral cards that IBM is putting into the Power Systems iron. First up is a new cryptographic accelerator, called by the unwieldy name of the PCIe Cryptographic

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• One Way To Condense A Verbose Spooled File

  November 29, 2016 Ted Holt

  IBM i includes many reports that we can use to glean a lot of information. If you run packaged software, the vendor likely includes many other reports. The problem with such reports is that they often contain more information than what you need and want. After all, they’re written for the world at large, not tailored for you. It may be that a utility that resides on your system can transform reports into something more suitable for you and those who use your system. First, let’s get a report. DSPLNK OUTPUT(*PRINT) DETAIL(*EXTENDED) DSPOPT(*USER) Running this command on one of the

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• Odds and Ends

  November 29, 2016 Hey, Gurus!

  The end of the year is upon us and the holidays are fast approaching. That sounds like a good excuse for some odds and ends. I hope you find something helpful here.–Ted Hey, Ted: I’m writing in response to Michael Sansoterra’s article, Native Regular Expressions In DB2 For i 7.1 And 7.2. I don’t use regular expressions much, but our C# development team does. Here’s a regular expression that I find to be of help. // count the slashes in the URL Dcl-S Count Packed(4); Exec sql set :Count = REGEXP_COUNT('/qibm/ProdData/Java400/bin/JavaDoc','/') ; –Steve Three decades or so ago, when

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• Fundamentals: Parameter Passing

  November 29, 2016 Jon Paris

  Even though high-level languages make it unnecessary–and in many cases, difficult–to understand what is going on “under the covers,” I have always found a basic knowledge of internal processes to be invaluable. This is particularly true when it comes to resolving mystery bugs. I was reminded of this recently by a number of problems related to parameter passing that appeared on Internet lists and also in my email directly from customers. My need to understand internals is due, at least in part, to the fact that I learned assembler and other low-level languages at an early stage in my career.

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• Forced Windows Migration Failures

  November 28, 2016 Dan Burger

  Here’s what 90 percent of the companies don’t do before, during, and after making the decision to migrate from IBM i to Windows. They don’t plan the way they would for any other major business event. Quite possibly that’s because management doesn’t understand the system they currently have and how it works, nor do they understand what the new system entails. Hasty decisions can be costly decisions. Hundreds of thousands of dollars are wasted. A recent blog post by Bob Losey on LinkedIn casts a critical look at these migrations and why so many of them are failures. Bob Losey

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• As I See It: Leave It To Cleaver

  November 28, 2016 Victor Rozek

  The grand paradox of humanity’s quest for wisdom is that the truly great questions have no definitive answers. Age-old questions such as: Why am I here? What is the meaning of life? And does the recent election prove that God exists, or that He doesn’t? These are the eternal questions that haunt us and rob us of sleep. But once in a while, like the proverbial blind squirrel bumping into an acorn, we stumble upon an elusive answer. The question in question is: What single quality in a spouse will be most useful to advancing your career? It’s a deliciously

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• The Supercomputer At The Heart Of The Power Systems Revival

  November 28, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With both the Supercomputing 2016 conference and Thanksgiving Day behind me, I find myself being thankful that the engineers that helped IBM make the transition from proprietary 48-bit CISC processors to 64-bit PowerPC processors in 1995–yes, that was more than two decades ago–were forward thinking. But as it turns out, there were other technologies, including massive floating point performance and database acceleration, that may in the long run help the entire Power Systems line not only survive, but thrive. We all know that the PowerPC-AS version of the Power line of chips was the only one of several early attempts

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• DB2 For IBM i: Made But Not Mastered

  November 28, 2016 Dan Burger

  IBM recently hosted an SAP on IBM i conference for customers and business partners. The conference is described as a showcase of best practices and advice on deployment of the latest technologies. IBM’s lineup of experts included Scott Forstie, DB2 for i Business Architect and a member of the DB2 on i Lab Services team. Forstie says interest in the new analytic features and OLAP functions available in DB2 for i surpasses anything to do with HANA. “Many attendees come to a conference like this to concentrate on better ways to use what they already own and to get the

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