• Tuning SQL Environments On i

  November 3, 2015 Paul Tuohy

  One of the frustrating things about being a speaker at conferences is that when you want to attend another session with a topic that peaks your interest, it invariably clashes with when you are speaking. But every now and again, the scheduling gods work in your favor. Such was the case recently, when I was speaking at the excellent International i-Power 2015 conference. Scott Forstie, IBM‘s DB2 for i business architect, was giving a presentation, “IBM i Services – SQL interfaces into the IBM i operating system.” I had recently done an iTalk with Scott where we had chatted

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• First Open Source Conference For IBM i Shops Planned

  November 2, 2015 Dan Burger

  IBM midrange shops have a distinction and a notoriety for being do-it-yourselfers. They like to invent, construct, and organize according to the individual characteristics of their business environments. They prefer tailor-made to off the rack. That’s why it seems open source development is well suited for the IBM i community. That and the fact that open source allows pilot testing without a purchase approval process. That’s important, too. Getting a grip on a project without the financial investment of buying software and signing service contracts appeals to some shops that prefer to keep their business an internal affair. And there

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• High Availability Calms Distributor’s Fears

  November 2, 2015 Dan Burger

  Behind this distribution company that spans Europe and the United States is an IBM Power8 system running IBM i. The production box is a single-socket, six-core, 3.02 GHz processor configuration capable of 59,500 CPW, but able to get the job done while operating on two cores. It sits in the home offices of LF SpA headquartered in Cesena, Italy, about a four-hour drive north of Rome. The company takes its business continuity very seriously, which is why it recently implemented high availability software from Maxava. Maxava has been in the high availability and disaster recovery business for 15-plus years.

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• Why The Time Has Come For Penetration Testing On IBM i

  November 2, 2015 Alex Woodie

  Home Depot’s point of sale (POS) system was breached in 2014, comprising information on 53 million accounts. A year before, Target’s POS was breached, putting data from at least 40 million customers in jeopardy. In both cases, the retailers were deemed “compliant” with Payment Cardholder Initiative (PCI) data security standards. But obviously there’s a big difference between complying with security regulations and actually having good security, and that’s true whether your shop runs on IBM i or any other platform. As cyber criminals get better at penetrating computer systems (and it’s worth reminding you that they are getting very, very

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• Reflections Upon The RPG & DB2 Summit

  November 2, 2015 Ted Holt

  Reflections Upon The RPG & DB2 Summit I just returned home from Chicago and another enjoyable learning experience at the RPG & DB2 Summit. This was the fourth consecutive Summit for me as a member of the session speakers group. I consider it an honor and a privilege to be teaching alongside people like Jon Paris, Susan Gantner, Paul Tuohy, Scott Klement, Barbara Morris, and many others. Each Summit has been very beneficial to me, and I suspect it is the same for others who attend. Meeting and talking with the conference attendees is a treat for me. These are

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• How To Join The Power Linux Evolution

  November 2, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is hard to remember that IBM was not exactly sitting on the sidelines when Linux swept over the datacenter in the early 2000s in the wake of the dot-com bust. Big Blue saw the rise of Linux early on, among its supercomputer customers, and it was unsure how to preserve its revenue streams from AIX and OS/400 systems while at the same time embracing Linux. Here we are 15 years later, and it looks like IBM finally has its Linux act together on Power. The question we all have is this: Will it make a difference? Hope springs eternal,

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• Questions About AES Encryption In RPG, DB2 for i, And The Web

  October 27, 2015 Michael Sansoterra

  Hey, FHG: We have never used encryption. Our new manager wants us to start using it on our IBM i 7.1 system. (For instance, we store passwords for our website members). I use the ENCRYPT_AES and DECRYPT_CHAR SQL functions in my RPG programs. However, with respect to AES encryption, our PHP web programmer is asking about how to generate an initialization vector and then save it later for decryption. Can you point us in the right direction? Finally, our manager doesn’t like the fact that the encryption key is in plain text in RPG source code. What are your

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• Let One Row Represent A Group, Take Three

  October 27, 2015 Ted Holt

  Faithful reader Bill Cisne sent me an email with an SQL SELECT query. No comment, no explanation, just code. Bill had figured out how to use a lateral join to solve a problem and was kind enough to share his success with me. I have been aware of lateral joins for some time, but have not found a need for them in my work. Today I revisit a problem to illustrate one way that lateral joins can be useful. LATERAL is a type of for-each loop within a query. For each row that a SELECT statement (the “outer” query) returns,

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• Using Adopted Authority Wisely

  October 27, 2015 Patrick Botz

  In my previous tip I explained adopted authority and admonished developers to use it wisely. This tip identifies some rules of thumb you should bear in mind when contemplating the use of adopted authority. User profile to adopt: If you’re not used to using adopted authority in your applications, one of the first questions that comes to mind might be “which user profile should I adopt?” The most straightforward way to use adopted authority is to adopt the authority of the owner of the objects used by the application. Rule: Create a user profile with ENABLED *NO, PWD *NONE, Initial

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• Academic Initiative Lives Up To Its Name

  October 26, 2015 Dan Burger

  The day will come. You’ll be better off if you start preparing now. Skills replacement is something you have to plan for. Reacting to skills lost through retirement or other avenues is a too little, too late scenario. You build a skills pipeline by bringing people into your organization and you move them along through the company. Aiding that effort is the IBM Power System Academic Initiative, which has been making some notable progress lately. Just a little more than a week ago, the Academic Initiative (AI) began promoting its new RPG course curriculum, a long overdue effort to

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