The IT Jungle

Why WebSocket Apps Are In Your IBM i Future

April 13, 2016 Alex Woodie

Do you pine for the simpler days of the AS/400, when RPG was king and data was served through super-efficient 5250 interfaces? If so, you’re not alone–the relentless crush of modern technologies takes a toll on all of us. But while the world isn’t likely to go back to RPG and 5250, you might find something that works in a similar way in a new technology called WebSockets.

KrengelTech‘s Aaron Bartell had a great description of WebSocket during a recent BCD webinar on Node.JS and other open source technologies for IBM i.

“It’s basically full duplex communication from client

Inside the New Analytic Functions of IBM i 7.3

April 13, 2016 Alex Woodie

If you’ve been waiting for new analytic functions to come to IBM i, your wait is about over. The new release of the IBM i OS that will ship Friday brings several new analytic features to the DB2 for i database–including the capability to do time-based queries and several new OLAP functions–that customers have been asking IBM to add for several years.

Temporal Queries

The new temporal features in DB2 for i will allow users to perform time-based queries, which could be used for business intelligence reasons, as well as for security and auditing reasons. Mark Anderson, the chief architect

Thank You, IBM

April 12, 2016 Brian Kelly

The IBM Corporation was run as a benevolent dictatorship through 1971. Thomas Watson Senior, and then Thomas Junior, ran IBM as if they owned it. They both had an entrepreneurial flair and few would deny that when they were in charge of IBM, they ran the company as if it were a sole proprietorship. They had many wonderful policies such as taking care of the people so that the people would take care of the business, and of course the classic: “Respect for the Individual.”

IBM believed in Wild Ducks and chairman Watson Junior wrote about them. He was not

Testing For Security Inadequacies

April 12, 2016 Dan Burger

Organizations are often reluctant to admit that they have inadequate system security. Quite possibly they may not even realize it. That’s not uncommon, particularly in the IBM midrange community, where we know there’s a false sense of security deeply rooted in the conviction that IBM i is inherently secure. Nothing could be further from the truth, although thinking any system is inherently secure is an equally foolish mistake. It’s all a matter of understanding how to manage security on a system.

Preconceived notions that the IBM i platform is some sort of superhero in a box is one of the

Spreading A Wider IT Net At UCG Technologies

April 12, 2016 Alex Woodie

Selling boxes in the midrange isn’t easy. A shrinking customer base, falling margins on hardware sales, and tight IT budgets combine to put the squeeze on even the best-run reseller outfits. For longtime IBM business partner Jim Kandrac, the shift was palpable enough to lead him to rename his Cleveland, Ohio-based company from United Computer Group to UCG Technologies.

It’s notable that “computer” is no longer in the name of Kandrac’s company. Are computers no longer important to the business? “The word computer is becoming more passé,” he says. “They’re still important, but they’re less important.”

In the heyday

IBM Puts Future Power Chip Stakes In The Ground

April 12, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Two important things happened at the OpenPower Summit last week. One of them concerns IBM i shops directly and the other one affects them indirectly and perhaps more importantly. The first is that IBM rolled out an official roadmap for Power chip development for the next five-plus years. The second was that search engine giant Google and cloud operator Rackspace Hosting said that they were collaborating on a design of a future system based on the Power9 chip.

Google has been experimenting with Power8 chips for at a couple of years, and we suspect (without any corroborating evidence at all

IBM i 7.3 Arrives April 15; 7.2 TR4 Follows in May

April 12, 2016 Dan Burger

It’s here. Today is IBM‘s announcement day for i 7.3, which becomes available Friday, April 15. The Technology Refresh, TR4 for i 7.2, arrives May 20. A new OS release is a glimpse of the future. For some of you, the future is now. You’re the early adopters–the people who put the bug in IBM’s ear several years ago about expanding analytical capabilities and help getting a handle on the security problem that is crying for attention.

This release fits into the long-term strategy of Chief Architect Steve Will by providing more options for those who want to develop

Refacing Your Database, Part 1

April 5, 2016 Paul Tuohy

Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here.

In this group of three articles, I will discuss a technique for refacing a traditional DDS defined database as an SQL DDL defined database. There will be no recreation of files or recompilation of programs, and it is not as much hard work as you think it might be.

The stored procedures, functions, programs, and commands used in these articles are available in the library SQLFACE, which can be downloaded here.

Before I get into the nitty gritty of refacing databases, I would just like to say

Enable or Disable Code at Run Time

April 5, 2016 Ted Holt

If you program in RPG or C, you should know how to use compiler directives to enable or disable source code at compile time. IBM i programmers should also know how to enable or disable executable code at run time, and why they would want to do such a thing.

Let’s talk about the why first.

One good reason to enable or disable code is for trouble-shooting. You might find it valuable to include commands to:

Display the job log
Dump program variables
Copy QTEMP files to another library
Build spooled files (like of the type I showed how to

Surge Of Services In DB2 For i, Part 1

April 5, 2016 Michael Sansoterra

The IBM i 7.2 TR3 and 7.1 TR11 technology refreshes come with a glut of new services. If you are responsible for IBM i administration, you are guaranteed to be tickled pink with these great enhancements. My examples are to call general attention to the availability of these services and give ideas on how they may be used. However, I still recommend going to the IBM documentation on the DeveloperWorks site (or the IBM knowledge center) to get full information on the parameters and all columns used by these special views and table functions.

For clarification, there are actually

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