• 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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• 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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