• See The IBM i Access You Never Heard Of

  May 9, 2016 Dan Burger

  The IBM i development team rolled out Access Client Solutions (ACS) almost three years ago. It remains a work in progress. And that’s a good thing. The IT graveyard is filled with products that were unable to show progress. Before there was ACS, there was Access for Windows. It can still be found in a great many IBM midrange shops, despite having one foot in the grave and no sign of a pulse when it comes to progress. The pace of progress established with ACS is not blindingly fast, but it’s steady and it’s an indicator of where and how

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• Refacing Your Database, Part 3

  May 3, 2016 Paul Tuohy

  In the preceding two articles, we saw how to extract, analyze and correct table and column definitions. In this, the final article on refacing your database, we look at some more options for re-representing data and, finally, generating a script to create the required views. Handling Numeric Date Fields One of the issues we need to handle is the representation of dates in the SASALHST table. Figure 1 shows how the purchase date is stored as a numeric field, the order date is stored as a year, month and day and the delivery date is stored as a century, year,

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• Dealing With Library Lists In RDi

  May 3, 2016 Ted Holt

  Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here. Today I follow up on a topic that Susan Gantner covered a few years ago, namely, how to more easily manage the library list while working in Rational Developer for i (RDi). It turns out that a couple of commands I wrote for green-screen work years ago are even more useful in my GUI development environment. When you start RDi, the library list is set according to your user profile, but you can override the initial library list in the connection properties. As you work, you may

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• Why Node.js?

  May 3, 2016 Aaron Bartell

  In case you haven’t noticed, IBM’er Tim Rowe and his team have been delivering a tremendous amount of open source the past few years–sometimes through vendor relationships and sometimes directly from IBM. While frequency has increased as of late, open source has actually been a mainstay on IBM i and its predecessors for a very long time. It started with the Apache web server, then Java, then PHP and MySQL, Ruby, Node.js, Python, and even more you haven’t even heard of. Open source (in particular Node.js) will be the topic of this article. But first, let me give you some

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• Good IBM i Ideas From Wisconsin

  May 2, 2016 Dan Burger

  One of IT Jungle‘s touchstone people in the IBM midrange community is Jim Buck. He’s just signed on for his 13th year as president of the Wisconsin Midrange Computing Professionals Association (WMCPA) and his day job is RPG instructor at Gateway Technical College. He is also the co-author of Programming in RPG IV, which is in its fifth edition. Buck knows the IBM i territory, and his experiences are indicators of where we are. Buck’s WMCPA connections combined with his teaching role at Gateway Technical College have developed into a pipeline of young talent that flows into

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• Mad Dog 21/21: The Mainframe Was The Message

  May 2, 2016 Hesh Wiener

  In 1964, as IBM announced the System/360, Marshall McLuhan, a professor at the University of Toronto, published a remarkable book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. He said each medium, independent of its content, is a powerful social force with characteristics that reshape the way people are interconnected. McLuhan distilled his thesis to a single memorable phrase: the medium is the message. Like print, radio, movies, and television, computing technologies, from the punch card to the mainframe to the mobile internet, are media, too. IBM doesn’t fully understand this; consequently, it flails and struggles. Marshall McLuhan:

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• IBM Bolsters HyperSwap to Protect IBM i Against Downtime

  May 2, 2016 Alex Woodie

  A new release of the HyperSwap feature in IBM‘s PowerHA Enterprise Edition will give IBM i shops better protection against IBM i downtime–in particular during planned downtime events, like operating system upgrades. IBM also released a statement of direction to bring more disaster recovery (DR) capabilities to HyperSwap, including support for a remotely located third copy of IBM i data. HyperSwap is a data resiliency feature introduced two years ago with the launch of IBM i version 7.2. The mainframe-class technology relies on the peer-to-peer remote copy (PPRC) synchronous data replication protocol (i.e. Metro Mirror) to replicate DB2 for

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• Study Identifies Disturbing IBM i Security Weaknesses

  May 2, 2016 Dan Burger

  Security threats–data breaches with bruising economic consequences that are triggered from within organizations, not outside–are beginning to grab the attention businesses formerly passive about the risks of status quo unpreparedness. Could be just in the nick of time. “We’d be lying if we said breaches were only happening to a small percentage of IBM i systems,” says Robin Tatam, director of security technologies at HelpSystems and the author of 2016 State of IBM i Security Study. This is the 13th year for the annual security report that identifies mistakes in system configurations that open the door to a smorgasbord

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• Making The Case For Flash Over Disk In Power Systems

  May 2, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Two weeks ago, concurrent with the launch of IBM i 7.3, Big Blue announced a slew of new flash storage drives and storage controllers, which we told you about based on the announcement letters as we normally do. Since that time, we have got our hands on some internal analysis that IBM has done for Power Systems partners and customers, and are sharing that with you to help in your buying decisions as you contemplate adding flash to your systems or, perhaps, even going all flash. Enterprises are doing it, now that the price for effective capacity after data compression

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• IBM i Scalability Stays The Same With 7.3

  April 25, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  All operating systems are not created equal, at least not when it comes to NUMA scalability. For a long time now, the IBM i operating system has trailed the scalability of its peers, AIX and Linux, on Power processors when it comes to spanning the large number of cores and threads that IBM forges into its Power machinery. Back in the dawn of time, and many of you were there with me, it was a very exciting thing to even be able to have a two-processor, two-thread machine like the AS/400-D80, which made its debut in April 1991 and which

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