• Did IBM i Just Get Hacked at DEF CON?

  September 2, 2015 Alex Woodie

  A presentation at the recent DEF CON hacker convention in Las Vegas raised some eyebrows among the IBM i crowd. In “Hack the legacy,” a European IT worker purported to demonstrate how to bypass the operating system’s security and take control of the machine. But according to IBM i security pro Carol Woodbury, the so-called vulnerabilities that could let black hats into your machine are actually old hat. You’d be fooling yourself if you believed that the IBM i platform was never discussed among hackers. But rarely has the proof been so stark as what came out of DEF

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• RCAC in DB2 For i, Part 2: Column Masks

  September 1, 2015 Michael Sansoterra

  In part 1 of this series, I discussed the row permissions portion of the new row and column access control (RCAC) security feature that was introduced in DB2 for i 7.2. In this tip, I will demonstrate how to use RCAC to hide sensitive information without hiding entire rows from a user. To sum up the last tip, RCAC is beneficial for protecting an integral business asset: data. Row permissions allow a database administrator to limit the rows users can view or modify in a table by defining access rules. Permissions to access rows are generally based on user profile

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• How Do I Join Tables? Let Me Count The Ways

  September 1, 2015 Ted Holt

  Normalization is the process of making sure that each datum is stored in the proper table. Storing data in the wrong place gives rise to anomalies, a fancy word for problems, and you have enough problems already. To make sense of normalized data requires that tables be joined. Do you know the methods to code a join with SQL and the advantages and disadvantages of each one? Method 1: WHERE When I first learned SQL, joining was done in the WHERE clause of the SELECT statement. Here’s an example. select h.*, d.* from SalesOrderHeaders as h, SalesOrderLines as d where

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• The Path To XML-INTO Happiness, Part 3

  September 1, 2015 Jon Paris

  Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here. In part 1 and part 2 of my XML series, I introduced you to the basics of using RPG’s XML support. In this tip we begin to explore some of the challenges that you may face when processing commercial XML documents, and the support RPG offers to handle them. Take a look at the snippet of an XML document below: <ItemsXRef > <Header RefId="xxxxx" TimeStamp="2011-11-30T00:06:06.643Z"> <to id="nnnnnn" name="nnnnnn"/> <from id="nnnn" name="A Company in Canada"/> <TransactionType>ItemXref</TransactionType> </Header> <Items> <SKU> <SKUID>10050322</SKUID> <UPC>6866261486</UPC> <WIN>30269675</WIN> <StatusCode>A</StatusCode> </SKU> <SKU> ... <snip> ... </SKU>

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• Profound Hires Guru Editor; Begins IBM i Internship Program

  August 31, 2015 Dan Burger

  Profound Logic Software, one of the leading IBM i vendors in the application modernization field, has hired Ted Holt, editor of our Four Hundred Guru newsletter. Holt is well known in the IBM midrange community for his knowledge of the platform, advocacy for IBM i education, and his contributions as a writer and speaker. His position at Profound will be senior software developer. He will continue as editor of Four Hundred Guru. In his new role at Profound, Holt will contribute to the development of new and existing products. The company’s graphical user interface suite, known as Profound

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• Mad Dog 21/21: Putting Money Where Its Malthus

  August 31, 2015 Hesh Wiener

  In 1798 Robert Malthus triggered a perpetual debate about the damaging effects of demographic pressure. An Essay on the Principle of Population asserted that, unchecked by canon, custom or calamity, a nation’s fecundity will outpace its ability to produce or procure food. A similar phenomenon can weaken a company. IBM’s revenue per employee has fallen since 2004, two years into Sam Palmisano decade-long reign. IBM’s subsequent leader, Ginny Rometty, hasn’t been able to reverse this dire trend; consequently, IBM’s corporate culture is losing vitality as its employees become financially undernourished. For IBM, as for other cultural aggregates since biblical

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• What IBM Can Learn From Free-Form RPG

  August 31, 2015 Dan Burger

  Three weeks ago, I wrote an article about free-form RPG, a runner-up in the IBM best kept secrets game and second only to magnificently camouflaged IBM i. Since then, I’ve collected the opinions of several more free-form observers. I’ve not talked with anyone who believes IBM is doing enough to encourage free-form conversion of old RPG code. But there is more to say about whether the benefits and the effort it takes to make the code conversion. Technically, the conversion from fixed-format to free-form RPG is pretty simple. Tools from IBM i ISVs ARCAD and Linoma Software are capable and

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• A Hypothetical Future IBM i System

  August 31, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  A few weeks ago, in the main story in this newsletter, I showed you the Power processor roadmap running out past the Power10 chip in 2020 and later and talked about the contrast between the huge amount of processing capacity that IBM is delivering in its Power Systems line and the relatively modest amount of oomph that the vast majority of IBM i shops need to do their daily work to make their daily bread. The gap, as I showed, is quite large, and it will continue to be so if current trends for usage growth and capacity growth continue.

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• HelpSystems Acquired By Private Equity Giant H.I.G. Capital

  August 31, 2015 Alex Woodie

  HelpSystems is set to be acquired by H.I.G. Capital, a Florida-based private equity and alternative assets investment firm with more than $19 billion in assets. Terms of the deal, which is not yet finalized and is subject to regulatory approval, were not disclosed. It will be the fourth sale in 10 years of HelpSystems, the Minnesota software company that has since become the biggest provider of systems management tools and utilities for the IBM i server. So who is the company now behind HelpSystems, which has grown its influence over the IBM i market following a long string of

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• ‘Workspace Aggregator’ Touts Mobile Access To IBM i Apps

  August 19, 2015 Alex Woodie

  A Belgian company named Awingu is touting its capability as a “workspace aggregator” to deliver cloud-based access to a variety of corporate applications and data from any browser-enabled device. Among the applications Awingu says it can tap into and securely deliver are those running on IBM i. The explosion of smartphones and other mobile devices is having a huge impact, not only how we live and play, but how we work too. Thanks to the rise of liberal bring your own device (BYOD) policies and mobile-enabled software as a service (SaaS) applications like Salesforce.com, many companies are not only allowing

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