• Pathfinder Probes For Answers To IBM i Questions

  March 16, 2016 Alex Woodie

  The best programmers, by their very nature, are lazy. Why write or buy something new when the function already exists? One of the most popular commercial tools that helps IBM i developers continue to be lazy is Pathfinder, a cross-reference and documentation utility developed by Hawkeye Information Systems. Now with support for RDi and free-form RPG, Pathfinder will help free a new class of developers from programming drudgery. At its root, Pathfinder is a programming tool. The software was first developed to work with the IBM System/3 back in 1976, and has been brought forward to the IBM i

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• No Regrets For JDE Shop Following Move To Third-Party Support

  March 16, 2016 Alex Woodie

  Like most technology executives, Dean Foods CIO Brian Murphy has to balance his company’s wants and needs. Its JD Edwards ERP systems must be maintained, but at the same time, employees desire things that make their lives easier, such as a new email system. Murphy found a way to fit both items into his budget after shifting the JD Edwards maintenance and technical support duties from Oracle to Rimini Street. Dean Foods is a longtime user of the IBM midrange server that’s gone by various names over its nearly four-decade run. The Dallas, Texas-based company is one of the

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• Verizon Outlines Disturbing AS/400 Breach At Water District

  March 16, 2016 Alex Woodie

  Cyber intruders who gained access to an AS/400 at a water district were able to manipulate the flow of chemicals into the public water supply, Verizon says in its latest Data Breach Digest. While customers served by the water district were not harmed, the episode shows the potential consequences of failure to properly secure critical systems in an increasingly connected world. Verizon dedicated five pages to laying out the disturbing breach of a water district that it referred to as Kemuri Water Company (KWC), which is not a real name. The water district had first contacted Verizon’s RISK Team to

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• Generating An Insert Script From Existing Data

  March 15, 2016 Paul Tuohy

  I was recently presented with an interesting conundrum. Can you generate an INSERT statement for data that currently exists in a table? For example, let’s say a table contained the following data: EMPID NAME GRADE BIRTHDATE JOINEDDATE SALARY 00001 Test AA 1956-05-14 2001-10-10 0.00 00002 Test2 - Has Null AA null null null Could I generate the corresponding insert statement similar to the following: insert into TESTSTUFF/TESTEMP (EMPID, NAME, GRADE, BIRTHDATE, JOINEDDATE, SALARY) values ('00001', 'Test', 'AA', '1956-05-14', '2001-10-10', .00), ('00002', 'Test2 - Has Null', 'AA', NULL, NULL, NULL); The original request was to generate an insert script for all

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• Dealing With A MIN/MAX Quirk

  March 15, 2016 Ted Holt

  The MIN and MAX functions have been a part of SQL since the beginning. A database-kind-of-guy-or-gal would think that anything so established would be stable to the point of boredom, but a database-kind-of-guy-or-gal would be wrong. MIN and MAX don’t even work the same way in all implementations of SQL, and to top it off, they have a quirk that I come upon occasionally. MIN and MAX began as aggregate functions. As such, they locate the minimum and maximum non-null values within a column across a set of rows. On this, everyone in the database world is in agreement. The

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• Getting Started With IBM i And .Net XMLSERVICE Connectivity

  March 15, 2016 Richard Schoen

  In my last article I introduced you to XMLSERVICE for accessing IBM i data and discussed why you might want to consider using the XMLSERVICE .Net wrapper API to connect to and utilize live IBM i data from your .Net applications. In this article, I will cover an overview of XMLSERVICE and the .Net wrapper API I created for .Net developers to use IBM i data without needing to install IBM i access. You will also get a chance to do your first connectivity test to the IBM i using the XMLSERVICE for .Net API. Getting Started For this session

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• More Jobs Lost Than Found During IBM Resource Action

  March 14, 2016 Dan Burger

  IBM‘s latest “Resource Action,” as it calls layoffs, has put the company in a position that is hard to defend. Big Blue has a ton of employees who were hired five, 10, 15, or 20 years ago to do work that no longer aligns with IBM’s strategic road map. Sorry folks, this company is not who you thought it was. And it’s no longer making money the way we thought it would. So things are changing. Years of good job reviews and loyalty to the company get you a “Thanks for Coming” award. By executive decision, IBM is going

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• As I See It: Playing With Pain

  March 14, 2016 Victor Rozek

  I’m loopy. Heavy drugs can do that to you. I can tell I’m loopy because my brain is operating at the speed of an impaired sloth. But I’d like to think I’m still coherent. Can’t be sure, though, because I’m loopy. (See, I just repeated myself like loopy people do.) The full effect of pain on productivity in the workplace is unknown. Millions of people go to work under the influence of prescription drugs. And those who have difficulty functioning on drugs stagger through their day enduring chronic pain. Pain, we are taught, is a private matter. Revealing it brings

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• Problem Solved, Carry On: The IBM Must Gather Tool

  March 14, 2016 Dan Burger

  The IBM i version of roadside assistance, thank your lucky stars, is better than a set of booster cables, a screwdriver, and a bungee cord. You have some remote tech support, some problem solving, some trouble shooting, and, best of all, you have something called the MustGather Data Capture tool. IBM Support created the tool, which is capable of automatically collecting debug data and fixing problems. It’s not Watson, but it’s pretty darn good. The IBM MustGather tool provides an automated option for sending/uploading MustGather data/files to IBM i Support from your IBM i Server. When executed, the tool will

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• Learn Great Stuff From IBM i Champions At COMMON

  March 14, 2016 Alex Woodie

  There are three things that go into making IBM i a great business platform: bullet-proof hardware, reliable software, and exceptional people. If your organization invests in its people (and don’t laugh, because not every company does), it will be hard to miss this year’s annual COMMON Annual Meeting and Expo, where a group of freshly minted Champions for Power will present some compelling sessions on the platform’s latest technology. The big annual COMMON show is still nine weeks off, but the schedule is already set. Judging by the session descriptions posted to commons16.sched.org/, you can expect to fill your

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