• 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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• 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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