• All Signs Point To The Cloud, But Will IBM i Crowd Follow?

  February 15, 2016 Alex Woodie

  You don’t need a weatherman to see that clouds are quickly building. American companies are moving workloads to big public computing clouds from Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, and others at an unprecedented rate, spurring a massive data center building boom. But will IBM i shops fall in line and move to the cloud? That’s where the forecast gets a little iffy. There’s an abundance of signals reflecting big uptake of clouds, including public clouds run by the aforementioned companies, as well as private clouds run by managed service providers (MSPs) and IBM business partners. A January study of

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• IBM Wheels And Deals On Big Iron Compute And Memory

  February 15, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  With the Power8 processors having been on the market in IBM‘s Power Systems machines for nearly two years now, and Intel widely expected to launch its “Broadwell” Xeon server processors within the next few months, you might think that Big Blue would be out there wheeling and dealing, offering all kinds of clever deals to try to keep machines moving. Maybe IBM’s sales force is doing this, and maybe its resellers are doing this, but the past two years during the Power8 generation have been the most quiet ones I can remember when it comes to a lack of

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• Parsing Delimited Text Data Natively In SQL, Part 2: Java To The Rescue

  February 9, 2016 Michael Sansoterra

  Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here. In Part 1 of this series, I introduced ParseFileContent, a 100 percent SQL user-defined table function (UDTF) that can parse delimited text (as a CLOB or IFS file) and format the results as rows and columns. As an advantage over tools like CPYFRMIMPF, this UDTF can streamline a text based import process by allowing CASTs, JOINs, and data integrity checks to be done while the import is running. As useful as ParseFileContent is, it does suffer a few drawbacks. ParseFileContent is not particularly fast and it can’t handle

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• Use SQL To Change A Substring

  February 9, 2016 Ted Holt

  Occasionally I need to change part of a string value in a database table. SQL has three mechanisms that let me accomplish such a thing. Do you know what those three mechanisms are and how to use them? First, we need a table for illustrative purposes. create table Parts ( ID char(6) primary key, Description varchar(40), Cost dec (5,2), Price dec (5,2)); insert into parts values ('XX-101', '20-inch Doodad', 0.12, 0.25), ('XX-105', '2-foot Doodad left-hand', 0.48, 0.75), ('XX-106', '2-foot Doodad right-hand', 0.48, 0.75), ('XX-118', '12-foot Doodad', 1.25, 3.00), ('BA-101', '5CM Widget', 0.30, 0.45), ('BA-104', '15Cm Widget', 1.00, 1.35), ('BA-111', '150cm

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• IBM i and .Net Connectivity With XMLSERVICE

  February 9, 2016 Richard Schoen

  Many businesses are looking for ways to modernize their IBM i applications while maximizing their existing code investments in RPG or COBOL applications. Some contend that using Microsoft development technologies is a bad way to go. They think it promotes replacement of existing IBM i applications or of IBM i itself. My position has always been that PCs and Microsoft technology are a great way to enhance existing IBM i applications. XMLSERVICE and Microsoft Visual Studio are open source technologies your company can use to modernize, enhance, and augment your existing IBM i code base. Using Microsoft .Net with XMLSERVICE

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• IBM Patches OpenSSH Security Flaws That Impact IBM i

  February 8, 2016 Alex Woodie

  IBM last week patched another pair of security vulnerabilities in the OpenSSH client for IBM i. The security flaws, which impact all current releases of IBM i–and very likely older releases that are no longer under maintenance–carry a moderate to severe risk, and could be used to execute arbitrary code on an IBM i server, obtain private cryptographic security keys, or execute a denial of service attack, IBM says. On February 1, IBM issued a security bulletin to address the two flaws in its OpenSSH implementation for IBM i. Both flaws stem from a poor design in the OpenSSH client

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• App Dev Evolution Opens Doors For Midrange Dynamics

  February 8, 2016 Dan Burger

  Application development continues to be the name of the game in IBM midrange shops. What’s changing is the integration of development environments. RPG development remains the meat and potatoes, but a growing list of side dish environments are on the table. Change management software helps maintain order as these diverse entities cross paths, but it also takes on more responsibilities beyond the strictly app dev assignments. Take Midrange Dynamics, for example. Its latest release of MDCMS, Version 7.4, features cross-system tracking capabilities at the top of the priority list. Workflow, troubleshooting, and deployment improvements have been added, but the

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• From Green Screens To Web Services: An ROI Story

  February 8, 2016 Dan Burger

  There are times when we find ourselves in the wrong place, but it turns out to be the right time. Les Peebles can tell you about that. During a presentation on webfacing 5250 screens, a technology that Peebles was not in favor of implementing, he was introduced to a web services option that came to be a solution to the IBM i and Windows integration issues he was grappling with. The wrong place was now the right place. Peebles began his IT career as an RPG developer. In the years that followed, he learned Java and web development. He also

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• The Jobs Of The People Who Make IBM i Platforms Work

  February 8, 2016 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We spend a lot of time talking about hardware and software here at IT Jungle, but there is another crucial element to the platform that often gets overlooked: the people who turn the machines into applications and, in turn, money from which they derive their many livings. The systems have evolved on the confluence of Moore’s Law advancement curves for their constituent components, but if people want to advance, they have to work hard to keep pace with new technology while maintaining the old. The whole point of the System/38, and its follow on, the AS/400 and its successors,

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• Where’s MKS Implementer? Alive and Well At PTC

  February 8, 2016 Alex Woodie

  It’s been years since we could talk about the Big Three of IBM i change management system vendors. Aldon, SoftLanding, and Mortice Kearns Systems have all been gobbled up by bigger software houses whose core business models, alas, do not revolve around the IBM i. And while IT Jungle has kept up with the first two, we haven’t delivered any insight on the MKS Implementer product that Parametric Technology Corp acquired several years ago–until now. PTC bought MKS in 2011 for $295.5 million (Canadian). As a developer of computer aided design (CAD) software, Massachusetts-based PTC is a much larger company,

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