• IBM i Power8 Migrations Flourish, Say Service Providers

  August 22, 2016 Dan Burger

  IBM‘s second quarter financial report was an icy description of Power Systems revenue. It exposed a shivering 24 percent decline compared to a year earlier. Despite that biting insight, there’s a warm glow in the midrange market that is predicted to continue through the third quarter. Migrations to Power8 boxes are finding momentum in the IBM i-dominated small to midsize market, where purchases have been delayed, but are now occurring at an accelerated pace. With hardware migrations comes downtime, so it’s interesting to take a peek at how the migration/downtime dilemma is being handled. Bob Johnson, an executive vice

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• The Prospects For A Power9 Revolution

  August 22, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As a relative underdog as a supplier of processors in the datacenter now that it has left the X86 server market and has gone from being a partner of Intel to a direct competitor that is fostering its own ecosystem in the richest and most competitive parts of the market, IBM wants for the Power processor to be able to take on the Xeon chip and win. The Power9 chip from Big Blue has about the best chance of any chip we have seen from IBM since the Power4 way back in 2001 to do this. The top chip engineers

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• Cilasoft Offers No Cost Job Log Exploration Tool

  August 17, 2016 Dan Burger

  The IBM i equivalent of a mountain avalanche is the job queue file. It’s a mass of files with the potential to eventually bury system admins as they search for good jobs that have gone bad. When job logs are thousands of pages in length and contain many similar entries, the search for specific troublesome job logs can become tedious, aggravating, and time consuming. About this time, users start wishing for a tool that efficiently sorts job log information. You might happily pay for a tool that reduces the amount of time it takes to track down jobs that are

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• TEMBO Adds Development Tool to Database Modernization Kit

  August 17, 2016 Alex Woodie

  TEMBO Technology Lab is beefing up its DB2 for i modernization solution. The South African provider of DB2 for i database modernization solutions has reached an agreement with Relational Data to resell its rapid application development tool for IBM i as part of its core Adsero Optima (AO) suite. Based in West Jordan, Utah, Relational Data is a longtime provider of IBM i-based applications and tools to the education market. Its OnePoint suite of software automates a range of processes for schools, including recording grades, managing student and parent data, and streamlining back-office functions like operations, HR, and finance. The

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• Bank Says ‘HA’ to System i Hardware Failure

  August 17, 2016 Alex Woodie

  When the New Zealand bank Westpac experienced a rare backplane failure in its System i server last year, it took a critical wholesale trading application completely offline. IBM immediately put a replacement on a plane, but the best case scenario called for three days of downtime. But thanks to its use of a high availability solution from Maxava, not a single transaction was lost. With more than 13 million customers, Westpac is one of the biggest banks in the Asia Pacific region, and one of Australia’s “big four” banks. The Sydney-based company relies on a variety of applications and

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• Inside Infor’s Data Science Lab

  August 17, 2016 Alex Woodie

  If you’ve noticed subtle improvements to your enterprise software lately, you’re not alone. For the past two years, IBM i ERP giant Infor has been using data science techniques to optimize various business processes that are automated by its software. And the best part may be that Infor is offering its Dynamic Science Labs expertise to customers for free and that improvements get wrapped back into the product. The big data revolution is impacting many aspects of our lives, including how we work and play. The technologies and techniques that the big Silicon Valley Web firms like Yahoo, Google

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• Ublu: A Modern Band-Aid for Legacy i Ills

  August 17, 2016 Alex Woodie

  In a perfect world, companies would hire and retain technology professionals who possess the requisite skills for working on the IBM i server. However, that is clearly not the case, as an IBM i skills shortage has bubbled up as one of the platform’s most pressing issues. For those jack-of-all-trades who are struggling with this thing called the IBM i, the open source tool Ublu offers a bridge to familiarity. Ublu is an interpretive scripting language designed for automating IBM i tasks from any remote platform capable of running Java, which includes Windows, Mac, Linux, OpenBSD, and other desktop operating

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• Assorted DB2 for i Questions

  August 16, 2016 Michael Sansoterra

  Shown below are assorted questions related to DB2 for i. If you have a question you’d like Four Hundred Guru to try to answer, be sure to visit the IT Jungle Contact page. Note that some of these questions were modified from their original form for clarity and simplicity. Adding an attribute to an element based XML Q: The FHG tips on composing XML documents from DB2 data (Part 1 and Part 2) do not describe how to add a custom attribute to element based XML. Consider the following query: SELECT XMLAGG( XMLROW(NAME as "Name", Color as "Color",

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• How To Insert With A Common Table Expression

  August 16, 2016 Hey, Ted

  I have to merge some new item numbers into our item master file. The problem I’ve run into is that there is more than one record for some items. None of the examples I found on the Web work for me. How do I write an SQL statement to copy all records from one file to another avoiding duplicates on part number? –Trent This is a new wrinkle on a challenge about which I have written before, namely the need to select only one row (record) to represent a group. (See the Related Stories below.) The wrinkle is that not

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• Overlaid Packed Data In Data Structures

  August 16, 2016 Jon Paris

  Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here. Sometimes things that should be simple give us difficulty. Jon Paris recently helped a Four Hundred Guru reader to solve a problem with overlaid packed-decimal data in data structures. We’re sharing their conversation for the benefit of others. Hi, Jon: My question has to do with overlaid packed-decimal data in a data structure. I store a date in CYMD format in a seven-digit, packed-decimal field. I am trying to extract the two-digit year from that. Dcl-Ds cymdDate; currentDate packed(7); currentYear packed(2) overlay(currentDate:2); End-Ds; When I set

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