• Observing i: An IBM Power Systems Champion Perspective

  March 28, 2016 Dan Burger

  Pete Massiello is an IBM i advocate, a past president of COMMON the world’s largest IBM i user group, and owner and CEO of a consultancy that specializes in system upgrades, performance tuning, and hosted services. The IBM midrange is his bread and butter. Massiello recently wrote a report he calls IBM i State of the Union, a perspective on the landscape based on what he has seen and what he expects to see. If Massiello was limited to five words to describe his report, they would be: Do not dismiss this platform. He acknowledges that companies are migrating

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• A Peek At Upcoming Open Source Enhancements In IBM i

  March 28, 2016 Alex Woodie

  Over the past 15 years, the open source community has driven a massive amount of innovation in IT. It has gotten to the point where IBM and Microsoft–two bastions of proprietary development–are now champions of open source. The open source wave is not quite as strong on the IBM i platform, but it appears that wave will gain momentum with the upcoming new release of the OS. It’s hard to quantify the value created through open source development of software. Last year, the Linux Foundation released a white paper that found the total value of the development of the

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• The Value Of Things That Don’t Change–And Those That Must

  March 28, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The wide expectation is that IBM will announce the next iteration of the IBM i operating system, up until now known as iNext and now thought to be IBM i 7.3, at its TechU conference in Atlanta, Georgia, on April 12. That is a week ahead of when COMMON is hosting a webinar with IBM i chief architect Steve Will to talk about new features in the platform, so the cat is out of the bag. The word we hear on the street is that there will be significant enhancements to the database and to the security systems of the

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• Slash Job Scheduler Setup Work by Half, ASCI Says

  March 16, 2016 Alex Woodie

  A new release of the ActiveBatch job scheduler from Advanced Systems Concepts contains new features that reduces the amount of job setup work by 50 percent, the company claims. The New Jersey software company, which supports the IBM i server with its job scheduler, also unveiled the results of a survey that demonstrates the importance of job scheduling to cloud, big data, and virtualization initiatives. Among the enhancements in ActiveBatch version 10, which ASCI announced nine months ago and shipped in February, are a job library that contains hundreds of “production-ready” job templates that the company says enables developers to

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• Maxava Introduces Subscription-Based, Multi-Platform Systems Monitoring

  March 16, 2016 Dan Burger

  When does system monitoring become a big enough concern to an IBM i shop that specialized software would be considered? Often it’s when one person has the responsibility for monitoring multiple systems. It doesn’t really matter if the systems run on the same OS or if multiple platforms are involved. Multiple systems ratchet up the complexity. To take on the task, Maxava has stepped up its product development. Available now is Maxava Monitor Mi8, a cloud-based, subscription-priced, system-monitoring software for IBM i. And within two to three months, it will add the capability to monitor Windows and Linux systems as

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• 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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