• IBM Upgrades High-End And Low-End Power8 Machines

  May 4, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In last week’s issue, we told you that IBM was working on rounding out the Power8-based Power Systems lineup with a four-socket midrange machine rumored to be called the Power E850 and that it was also expected to expand the high-end Power E880 line with its full complement of Power8 processors. We didn’t expect hardware announcements at the COMMON midrange conference in Anaheim, but on Tuesday last week Big Blue went and put out some of the new Power8 iron anyway without doing a formal announcement. Specifically, in announcement letter 115-021, IBM has added some processor options for low-end,

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• Head Power Sales Honcho Fires Up The IBM i Base

  May 4, 2015 Alex Woodie

  IBM i professionals are an unusually passionate and loyal group of customers, but you don’t typically hear much emotion from the IBM executives in charge of steering the ship. So when IBM’s top Power Systems salesman took the podium at last week’s COMMON conference and fired up the base with a rousing keynote address, it was a rare treat. After taking care of business and handing out the awards in a fairly full conference room at the Disneyland Hotel last Sunday, COMMON president Pete Massiello turned the microphone over to Alex Gogh, the vice president of global sales for IBM

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• SystemObjects Gets The Word Out On Mobile Messaging

  April 27, 2015 Dan Burger

  A mobile messaging app that can automatically receive information from applications or utilities running on IBM i or Windows servers could change the way you think about mobile computing and business objectives. SystemObjects, the French software company that specializes in Web and mobile solutions for IBM midrange computer users, is rolling out a new utility that it believes is the best way to get the attention of business-oriented mobile device users. The utility is called Push4Servers. It works by sending push messages using a simple API call inserted into any number of user programs. Push4Servers consists of three parts:

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• IBM Blocks ‘Bar Mitzvah’ Attack In SSL/TLS

  April 27, 2015 Alex Woodie

  IBM recently issued a security bulletin for a newly discovered security vulnerability–a weak cryptography algorithm in the SSL/TLS protocol stack–that could allow hackers to steal data. That vulnerability was dubbed the “Bar Mitzvah Attack” by the security researcher who discovered it because it uses a 13-year-old weakness in the RC4 algorithm. The Bar Mitzvah flaw was first described by Itsik Mantin, director of security research with Imperva, at the Black Hat Asia security event held in Singapore last month. The attack stems from a weakness in the way that the RC4 stream cipher creates encryption keys, which could allow

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• Power Systems Sales Return To Growth

  April 27, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It has been a long decline as the Unix and proprietary systems market succumbed to the double whammies of server virtualization and Moore’s Law increases in performance and decreases in price/performance, but it looks like IBM‘s Power Systems business may have found a new floor on which it can build some growth. That is a lot better than the overall IBM business can say, which has been slipping quarter by quarter, for years now and which did it again in the first quarter of 2015. In the quarter ended in March, IBM booked $19.5 billion in revenues, down 11.9

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• Fresche Legacy Advances App Dev Integration Plan

  April 27, 2015 Dan Burger

  A lack of IT integration is costing organizations untold, but not unquantifiable, sums of money. The noose on careless spending is tightening as the realization of integration benefits slowly comes into focus in specific areas–one of those being application development and modernization projects, which are top concerns for many businesses. Shortening the development process, increasing the quality of applications before turning them loose in production, and reducing the maintenance burden are all part of integration goals. With integration as a target, Fresche Legacy has taken a step toward combining development tools, code analytics, and software change management by integrating its

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• The Remaining Power8 Systems Loom

  April 27, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The rumors have started going around that IBM is getting ready to launch the remaining members of the Power8 family of Power Systems machines. We had been anticipating that these machines might come out in concert with the COMMON user conference in Anaheim, California, this week or perhaps at the IBM Edge2015 conference to be hosted in May in Las Vegas. We still do not know for sure when the expected midrange and high-end Power8 machines are coming, but they are not launching at COMMON as far as our sources know. Last fall, when the Power E870 and half of

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• Ruby And DSLs And Blocks

  April 21, 2015 Aaron Bartell

  When I started with Ruby I was immediately drawn in by its syntax–simple, elegant, and easy to peruse. At the time I didn’t know this was an intentional mantra of the language put in place by Yukihiro “Matz” Matsumoto, Ruby’s creator. Matz said that he was “trying to make Ruby natural, not simple,” in a way that mirrors life. Further, Matz stated “Ruby is simple in appearance, but is very complex inside, just like our human body.” Let’s take this out of metaphor-land and into tangible code by introducing the DSL, or Domain Specific Language, aspect of Ruby. First, what

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• Joining On Ranges

  April 21, 2015 Ted Holt

  People are ingenious. Where there’s a need, they find a way. Unfortunately, some of the ways they find don’t jibe well with relational databases, which makes my work life messy. Fortunately, I know a few ways to clean it up, and here’s one of them. Suppose you work for a company that sells office supplies. One day someone walks into your office and asks for a report of sales of boxes. “Sure thing!” you reply. “How do I know that an item is a box?” “Easy,” he replies. “The item number begins with 134.” Easy, indeed. select ItemNumber, Description from

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• An SQL Pivot Procedure

  April 21, 2015 Paul Tuohy

  The basic concept of a pivot is that row values are transformed into column values. I have often wished that DB2 had a pivot procedure. But until that day arrives I will have to make do with a workaround that you might find useful too. The workaround is in the form of a stored procedure that can be used to pivot any column in any table. Before getting to the stored procedure, let’s look at a simple pivot example. These examples are using the SALES table in the DB2 sample database. To create the DB2 sample database on your system,

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