• Keep An i On Open Source

  April 25, 2016 Dan Burger

  The marriage of open source and IBM i reminds me of a marriage statistic that recently came to my attention: Approximately $6 billion in revenue is lost by American businesses as a result of decreased worker productivity linked to marriage hardship. Employees in a happy marriage, in contrast, tend to increase a company’s bottom line. From what I have seen of IBM i advocates in relationships with open source, happiness seems to abound. Cross-trained RPG developers boasting open source language skills aren’t exactly common, but their numbers are increasing as IBM i shops with modernization intentions follow through on plans

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• New Financials At IBM Can’t Mask Growth Issues

  April 25, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is easy to say that the IBM we know today, or more precisely are trying to get to know as it undergoes its changes, is far different from the one that we were trying to understand two decades ago as it was going through another tumultuous transformation. The Big Blue from the middle 1990s was a systems company before and after that change, but it is harder to see the International Business Machines skeleton inside the new Big Blue. But if you dig around, that core systems business is still there, even after IBM has completely reclassified its financials

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• IBM i 7.3: High Time For High Security

  April 25, 2016 Dan Burger

  How important is data confidentiality to you? On a scale of one to 10, it should be the only double-digit number you can choose. The risks for those unable to control and protect their information are far greater than ever before. The same thing will be said each year into the foreseeable future. So when looking for innovative ways to protect information, IBM acted by adding a tool called authority collection to the new i 7.3 release. Call it a tool, a utility, or a capability authority collection is now built into the latest OS. The simplest explanation is that

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• Software Vendors Prep For IBM i 7.3, Applaud PDP for Testing

  April 25, 2016 Alex Woodie

  It’s been only 10 days since IBM i 7.3 became generally available, and customers are just starting to play around with it. While we don’t expect many 7.3 environments to go into production right away, a surprising number of software vendors already support it. And you might be interested in learning about the innovative new way that IBM is helping vendors get current on new releases, namely the Power Development Cloud (PDP). There’s a lot of good stuff in IBM i 7.3, which IBM announced on April 12 and shipped three days later. In addition to the neat new analytic

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• Refacing Your Database, Part 2

  April 19, 2016 Paul Tuohy

  The whole purpose of refacing our database is to give proper names to tables and columns. So we have to spend some time ensuring that our names are right. In this article, the second in a series of three, we continue the refacing process by analyzing and correcting our new naming. In my first article, we had reached the stage where we had extracted table and column definitions into our two conversion tables (TABLE_TRANSLATION and COLUMN_TRANSLATION), as shown below: Analyzing the Names Since the new column names were generated from the text descriptions of the original fields, there is

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• View Scheduled Jobs with Excel

  April 19, 2016 Ted Holt

  At the recent RPG & DB2 Summit in Dallas, I presented a session that dealt with the use of SQL in CL. One of my examples used the SCHEDULED_JOB_INFO view to retrieve scheduled jobs from the IBM i job scheduler. After the talk, one of the attendees gave me a great idea, and I’ve just got to pass it along to you. SCHEDULED_JOB_INFO returns the same information that you can see with the Work with Job Schedule Entries (WRKJOBSCDE) command. It’s one of the IBM i Services. The gentleman told me that he and others in his shop had been

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• Surge of Services in DB2 for i, Part 2

  April 19, 2016 Michael Sansoterra

  Continuing where we left off in Part 1, a slew of new IBM i services (and enhancements to existing services) were released in IBM i 7.2 TR3 and IBM i 7.1 TR11. This article continues to detail some of the important new services. As always, keep in mind that just an overview is given here and that the developerWorks documentation or IBM i Services in the Knowledge Center should be consulted in order to understand the full capability of each service. SYSTOOLS.GROUP_PTF_DETAILS This view runs a real-time query against the IBM Preventative Service Planning (PSP) website and can indicate

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• We Can Just Barely See RPG In i 7.3

  April 18, 2016 Dan Burger

  Just another day in RPG paradise. No place we’d rather be. Kicked the old fixed-format habit and have gone free. Embedded SQL and integrated XML. Got RDi wired. You’re totally modern, so what’s next? Well . . . if you’re looking for RPG fun in i 7.3, you’ll be mostly disappointed. The IBM shopping cart isn’t empty, but that loaf of bread and a package of baloney isn’t the rib-eye steak we were hoping for. In case you missed it, the steak was delivered with the IBM i 7.2 TR 1 release in the fall of 2014, which was also

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• As I See It: He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not

  April 18, 2016 Victor Rozek

  The sheer magnitude of the math first caught my attention. It was an article I came across called 19 Signs Your Employer Doesn’t Care About You. Nineteen, mind you! Not the usual 3 or 7 or even the venerable Top 10; someone actually dredged up 19 different indications that a stranger–who they only glimpse professionally–may not be their most ardent admirer. OK. Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they don’t dislike you. But let’s face it, you have to break a sweat to think up 19 tells that prove someone doesn’t give a rat’s thumb drive about you. Most

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• DB2 Web Query For i Now Supports External Databases

  April 18, 2016 Alex Woodie

  New OLAP and temporal data capabilities in DB2 headlined the launch of IBM i 7.3. But those weren’t the only analytic functions delivered last week by IBM. Tucked inside the announcements was a new release of DB2 Web Query for i that will make it easier to bring data from outside databases into an IBM i-based data warehouse. IBM is including new data adapters with DB2 Web Query for i Standard Edition version 2.2 that support PostgreSQL, MariaDB, and MySQL. The new release also includes support for generic Type 4 JDBC drivers, which will make it easier to get

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