• IBM i Finds A Place At Edge Conference

  September 26, 2016 Dan Burger

  The IBM i community was born and raised with platform-specific tendencies. That was the way of the IBM IT world for many years. It’s not the way anymore. The strategy for IBM Power Systems, running i and AIX, is much more open. It’s OpenPower and OpenStack oriented. Its roadmap has cloud and cognitive computing highlighted. The IBM Edge conference last week left no doubt about that. So what’s left for i? Power Systems general manager Doug Balog says there’s plenty. IBM continues to invest in IBM i, Balog says, using the stream of OS releases 7.1, 7.2, and 7.3 as

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• New Service Combats Complacency In IT Security

  September 19, 2016 Dan Burger

  The chilling reality of IT security weaknesses is widely overlooked and often assumed to be something that only affects someone else’s business. A close look at our own organizations makes us uncomfortable. So do stories that include expert opinions that every business should begin its security review with the realization that a security breach has already occurred. That’s how real the threat is. And your current security policy, if you even have one, is probably obsolete. Security is an ongoing process. It’s not inherent in the system, not even the legendary IBM i platform. “Attackers and their targets and objectives

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• As I See It: The Girl Who Liked to Count Things

  September 19, 2016 Victor Rozek

  She was born nearly a century ago in a little town in West Virginia with the unappealing name of White Sulphur Springs. There, the well-healed gathered to escape the summer heat and soak away their ailments at a resort that employed her father. She would not have been welcome there as a guest, however. She is black. At the time, educational opportunities for black children in her county–those who could even contemplate such lavishness–ended with eighth grade. So her parents were forced to find a high school she would be permitted to attend, the nearest being about 120 miles away.

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• Is It RDi Time Yet?

  September 19, 2016 Dan Burger

  It would be great fun to begin this article with news that IBM i enthusiasts were virtually lined up like box cars on freight trains to download Rational Developer for i (RDi), the modern graphical design tool for application development. It’s not that dramatic. Sheer numbers don’t tell the entire story, however. There’s a bit of detectable momentum. What are the chances IBM will help that momentum grow? It’s actually better than the pessimistic answer: slim and none. One reason for optimism stems from the Rational for i team escaping IBM Software Group in 2015 and finding a more welcoming

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• What’s Ed McVaney Up To Next?

  September 19, 2016 Alex Woodie

  In the IBM i world, no software vendor has found as much as success as JD Edwards. Sold to PeopleSoft for $1.8 billion in 2002 and now a part of Oracle, JD Edwards was the gold standard by which other ERP packages on the platform were measured. Now the principle founder of JD Edwards, Ed McVaney, is involved in another software startup in the Denver, Colorado area called Nextworld. But what does the company do? That’s a tough question to answer, as the company is still in “stealth mode” ahead of an official launch, ostensibly, at some point

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• New OpenPower Servers Present Interesting IBM i Possibilities

  September 19, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It seems increasingly likely to us that over the long haul IBM will get out of manufacturing all but the largest of its Power-based servers and its System z mainframe line, which by definition is big iron. There are a number of implications of this strategy for IBM i shops, of course, but let’s be honest here. Connect the dots and this seems inevitable. Back in the AS/400 days, IBM made a custom machine, complete with homegrown processors and auxiliary compute, its own memory, and its own disk drives. When IBM started converging the AS400 and RS/6000 lines on the

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• Generate SELECT For All Columns

  September 13, 2016 Hey, Mike

  I have a table with a long list of column names and I want to build a SELECT statement from the catalog metadata. If I supply schema (library) and table (physical file) names, is there a way to generate a SELECT statement? —Four Hundred Guru Reader Thanks to dynamic compound statements and global variables, the answer is yes, it’s fairly easy to construct a SQL statement for a table or view as shown below: /* Build Select Statement and stuff it in QGPL.TEMPSQL variable */ BEGIN -- Fill in your table/schema name DECLARE @TABLE_NAME VARCHAR(128) NOT NULL DEFAULT 'SYSCOLUMNS';

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• Determine The State Of The Error

  September 13, 2016 Ted Holt

  The SQL Procedures Language (SQL PL) has an effective error-handling mechanism–condition handlers. When a statement returns a certain SQL state or a certain type of exception, the condition handler takes control. However, determining which SQL state to test for can be problematic. Here are two ways. Let’s start with a simple stored procedure. Create or replace procedure CreatePlants begin create table plants ( ID dec(3), Location varchar(16), primary key (ID)); label on table plants is 'Plant master'; insert into plants values ( 1, 'Lost Angeles'), ( 2, 'New Yolk'), ( 3, 'Last Vegas'); end What could go wrong? Well, the

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• How Do You Do That With RDi? Part 1: Copy A Source Member

  September 13, 2016 Susan Gantner

  I’m an RDi fan. I make no secret about that. Even so I occasionally find things that I need to do that just seem easier or faster to do with PDM in the green screen. I don’t really mind that. I nearly always have a green screen session sitting just next to my RDi workbench anyway. But when I can find a way to do a function as easily in RDi, I prefer to do that so that I don’t need to switch modes as much. This tip is the first in a series on things that I find some

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• Howdy, Partner. Welcome To The IBM i Modernization Ranch

  September 12, 2016 Dan Burger

  The IBM i community is best known for its RPG programmers and its steadfast loyalty to a computing platform with blue-collar traits such as handling heavy workloads without a flock of nannies tending to its special needs. Behind the uncomplaining “workforce in a box” is a mix of application development environments and programs that are a combination of packaged products from the IBM midrange vendor community and home grown application handiwork. Software vendors have long relied on establishing business partners–resellers, integrators, and sources of referrals–to expand their sales channels. At the same time, organizations on the buying side of IT

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