• Free Form RPG Scores IBM i Innovation Award

  May 16, 2016 Dan Burger

  From the time free form RPG was introduced with IBM i 7.1 TR 7, expectations have been high. There’s been much talk about the potential for greatness, but only scattered reports of success. Finally, free form RPG is lighting up the scoreboard. Arkansas Electric Cooperative Corporation (AECC) is showing the way. It’s made free form RPG the cornerstone of future development, and its endeavors led to the 2016 COMMON-IBM Power Systems Innovation Award. The award was presented Sunday at COMMON‘s Annual Meeting and Exposition, which just got underway in New Orleans, Louisiana. AECC is based in Little Rock. It

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• Zend Touts 2X Speedup With PHP 7 And New Runtime

  May 16, 2016 Alex Woodie

  The new release of Zend‘s PHP development language and PHP runtime will run twice as fast on Intel Xeon and IBM Power servers than previous versions, the company says. IBM i customers won’t need to do anything to take advantage of the speedup except use the new runtime, which should be available in the coming weeks. Zend, which is now owned by Rogue Wave Software, last week officially announced Zend Server 9, the newest version of the Zend runtime for Intel platforms. Zend Server 9 is based on PHP version 7, the newest version of the language, which

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• Jazzing Up IBM i In COMMON’s Quarter

  May 16, 2016 Alex Woodie and Dan Burger

  New Orleans has taken on a decidedly IBM i tint thanks to the start of COMMON‘s Annual Meeting and Expo over the weekend. An estimated 1,100 attendees are in the Big Easy for the four-day show, which began Sunday morning with remarks by COMMON president Kevin Mort, and also featured a glimpse into the future of Power Systems, courtesy of IBM Power Systems executives Steve Sibley and Stephanie Chiras. The spring COMMON conference is still the biggest IBM i show on earth and provides attendees a chance to beef up their skills, socialize with other IBM i professionals, check

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• When You Reach Your Break(ing) Point. . . Or Not

  May 10, 2016 Susan Gantner

  I’m always surprised at how well-attended my RDi debugging presentations are. After all, once you know about service entry points, there’s not a huge amount that’s new and radically different about debugging, even with RDi. Then again, I’m constantly learning new things. Here’s something I learned just last week, in fact. Let’s assume that you already have a debug session running on the troublesome program and we’ll look at setting and using breakpoints. The most obvious and common way to set one is to position your cursor on the statement where you want it. From there, you can use

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• Sending Escape Messages From RPG, Take 2

  May 10, 2016 Hey, Ted

  In Sending Escape Messages from RPG, your program defines the message data parameter as 80 bytes, but the IBM manual (Send Program Message (QMHSNDPM)) defines the parameter as char(*), with notes saying it can be up to 32767. I would like a variable longer than 80, but instead of coding 100 today, 120 next project, and so on, I’m wondering how I could code it better to take full advantage of the API. –Glenn The short answer is that you don’t have to code the length. Let the compiler figure it out for you. Here’s an illustration that may

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• OLAP Aggregation Specification In DB2 For i 7.3

  May 10, 2016 Michael Sansoterra

  If I could use one word to describe the new DB2 for i OLAP features in IBM i 7.3, it would be “Booyah”! (According to the Urban dictionary, “booyah” is “used in order to abruptly express great joy, usually brought on by victory or some other sort of accomplishment.”) Though there are many new features in i 7.3 under the umbrella of OLAP, for now I’m going to demonstrate the new OLAP aggregation specification. It was way back in 2006 in V5R4 that DB2 for i developers were first treated to OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) functions. If you’re unfamiliar with

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• IBM To Sell Off Two-Thirds Of The Rochester Labs

  May 9, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  This news is not entirely unexpected, but it is difficult just the same. The word on the street is that IBM will be selling off about 2 million square feet of the legendary Rochester Labs in the coming year. That is about two thirds of the capacity of the facility, which once housed over 8,000 employees and was the center of gravity for the IBM midrange since it was conceived in 1969. The Rochester Labs, which were established in 1956, are a bit older and were part of the geographic distribution that Big Blue has always liked in its operations,

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• BCD, Midrange Dynamics Partner On IBM i Modernization

  May 9, 2016 Dan Burger

  When you think of modernizing applications to increase their efficiency and extend the original investment in the business logic that is so important to your organization, it should be apparent that the process requires some controls and management. It’s a bit like having a map and compass when going into the wilderness. That’s why we’re seeing partnerships form between the application development vendors and the change management vendors. The most recent hook-up is a partnership between BCD Software and Midrange Dynamics. BCD has created several methods for IBM midrange shops to modify, install, and distribute application changes. For the

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• IBM Melds FlashSystem With XIV To Scale Enterprise Flash

  May 9, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Over the past few weeks, we have been analyzing the new flash modules and controllers that IBM has made available for plugging into Power Systems machines and significantly boosting the performance of the storage arrays under the skins of the servers. This week, we will take a look at the new FlashSystem all-flash arrays from Big Blue, which are aimed at much larger workloads that cannot fit within the system. The two new FlashSystems that IBM announced concurrent with the internal flash storage back in April are much heftier machines than it has been peddling to date, and the more

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• Temporal Table Trouble?

  May 9, 2016 Alex Woodie

  One of the exciting new features in IBM i 7.3 is the addition of temporal queries in the integrated DB2 for i database. The so-called “time travel” query capability will let users ask how a particular piece of data looked at some time in the past, using good old SQL. While this new capability is included with the standard version of the database, a key feature that makes temporal useful costs extra. The temporal query functionality was one of the big new features in IBM i 7.3 and brings the DB2 for i database up to par with the temporal

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