• Ingenuity And Integration Meet In IBM i Data Warehouse

  September 12, 2016 Dan Burger

  It’s not uncommon for people to overlook the IBM i Power Systems platform when it is data warehouse project planning time. Laura Hamway sees things differently. Hamway is a consultant who works primarily with manufacturing companies running Infor‘s LX ERP systems, which most people refer to as BPCS, the name of the software before the Infor acquisition. She helps these organizations consolidate data from multiple systems, which allows a single, summary view. More analysis. Less inefficiency. Better business. There’s too much data for ease of use in transactional applications like BPCS, MAPICS, JD Edwards and other ERP software that

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• IBM Updates Rational Developer With Mac OS, Other Goodies

  September 12, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you like creating applications in the Rational Developer for i integrated development environment, and you also like Apple Macs, then IBM has a release update for you. In announcement letter 216-143, Big Blue said that it was making the Mac OS client a peer to Windows and Linux machines with the V9.5.1 update to the RDi tool. To be ultra precise, RDi is now compatible with Mac OS X 10.11. IBM warns that some functions of RDi, such as program verifiers and syntax checkers, are not available on Mac OS, and it is not clear when or if

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• Micro Focus Embiggens Mightily With HP Software Buy

  September 12, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Two years ago, Micro Focus started building out its software empire in legacy systems with the acquisition of the Attachmate conglomerate, a company that was bigger than itself at the time. And now, Micro Focus has done it again, this time by eating the bulk of the software that is currently owned by Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which has lost all urges to try to build a complete hardware-software-services stack like IBM used to have back in the 1990s and 2000s. HPE, which is the part of the Hewlett-Packard empire that includes the Four Ss of servers, storage, switching, and

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• The IBMer Who Decoded Bernie Madoff’s RPG

  September 12, 2016 Alex Woodie

  When Bernie Madoff’s massive Ponzi scheme collapsed in 2008, erasing $65 billion in supposed wealth, the midrange community was somewhat surprised to learn that an AS/400 was at the heart of the operation. Soon thereafter, FBI agents called Rochester, Minnesota, with a request for IBM: Give us an expert witness who can untangle the ancient RPG II code and explain how it works to a jury. That job eventually fell to longtime IBMer Rich Diedrich. Diedrich had worked in Lab Services since the early 1990s, back when it was called the Custom Technology Center. While Diedrich has expertise in

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• Getting Started With IBM i, .Net, and XMLSERVICE Remote Commands

  August 30, 2016 Richard Schoen

  Running CL commands and submitting batch jobs are great ways to use existing program functionality from a .Net desktop, web, or web service application. In this article we’ll focus on the XMLSERVICE remote command functionality. You’ll see just how easy it is to use XMLSERVICE to run programs or submit batch jobs on your IBM i systems. In this installment we’ll begin to tour the XMLSERVICEi .Net application code and samples, starting with the remote command call example. If you haven’t installed and set up the XMLSERVICE application code and created an Apache web server instance yet, please check out

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• Message Data Data Structures

  August 30, 2016 Hey, Ted

  Sending Escape Messages from RPG is a great article. Your program defines the message data parameter as 80 bytes of character data, but the IBM Knowledge Center defines MSGDTA as char(*) with notes saying it can be up to 32,767 bytes. I would like a variable longer than 80 bytes, but instead of coding 100 today, 120 next project, and so on, how could I code it to take full advantage of the API? –Glenn You’re right that the API can handle up to 32K of data, but you need only define MsgDta as large as you need it to

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• Easy Printing from CL, Take Two

  August 30, 2016 Hey, Ted

  When I read your statement that CL cannot write to printer files, I immediately thought, “It can’t? Then what have I been doing for the last couple of decades?” I looked through the article and saw that it didn’t mention my most used method, and I wondered how it was missed. –Tom Liotta Tom takes advantage of one of the best features of ILE, namely the ability to bind routines written in different languages to form one program. The non-CL procedure that he included is the printf function, which is well-known to C programmers. Even though printf produces stream

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• Clouds Grow, But Can IBM i Follow?

  August 29, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Until cloud computing–meaning virtualized compute, storage, and networking that is sold under utility pricing–is absolutely the norm in the data center, we will be talking about what is and is not cloud and how fast it is or is not. The prognosis is that investments in public cloud computing are going to continue to grow fast, much faster than the overall IT sector, which has been coasting along more or less level for years. That placid surface on overall IT spending masks the churn underneath the surface, so don’t be fooled. According to researchers at IDC public cloud spending is

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• Time For Tapeless? LaserVault Tempts The SMB

  August 29, 2016 Dan Burger

  IBM midrange shops with dedicated system operators that manage backup media and drives are few and far between these days. The common staffing arrangement has programmers or maybe network admins juggling backup duties along with their other responsibilities. Of course, lean staffing invites human error into IT operations. Automating backup procedures can provide welcome relief. Data at risk is a problem that Electronic Storage Corporation is addressing with a new appliance it calls Backup SAVSmart for i. Electronic Storage Corporation is the maker of LaserVault backup and recovery solutions. SAVSmart uses the newest version of the LaserVault Backup software, which

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• Tape: It Ain’t Dead Yet

  August 29, 2016 Alex Woodie

  In 2003, the inestimable Richard Pryor got in a good, last laugh when he starred in the Comedy Central documentary “I Ain’t Dead Yet, #*%$#@!!” In some ways, you could say that magnetic tape is the Richard Pryor of the storage world: Everybody seems to think tape is already dead, but it keeps delivering the goods year after year anyway. If your midrange shop is like most, there is probably a magnetic tape drive toiling away. That’s because, despite the repeated predictions of its death, tape still plays a critical role in the back-office IT operations of tens of thousands

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