• Handling Constraints Revisited

  March 31, 2015 Paul Tuohy

  I recently had an email from Doug, who was making use of some code I had published way back in February 2010 in my article Handling Constraint Violations in RPG. The article discussed how to trap a constraint violation caused by a WRITE/UPDATE/DELETE operation and, more importantly, how to determine the name of the constraint that caused the violation. Doug had come up with an instance where my code was not working! After going through the usual stages of denial, anger, and some expensive therapy, I read the rest of the email. Doug’s code worked fine with an RPG

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• Reader Feedback On What’s Up In The IBM i Marketplace . . . Don’t Miss the IBM i Marketplace Webcast . . . COMMON Is Coming, Linux and VIOS Get Top Billing

  March 23, 2015 Hey, Dan

  Reader Feedback On What’s Up In The IBM i Marketplace Hey, Dan: Your article on the HelpSystems survey of IBM i shops states: “For any IBM i advocate, this survey brings good news. By a wide margin, it demonstrates that organizations have no imminent plans to leave the platform. Nine out of ten are staying put. “This seems to me to be a marketing spin by HelpSystems. The 89 percent of shops that “have no imminent plans to leave the platform” includes 23.8 percent that are talking about leaving the IBM i platform, and 11 percent that are not sure

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• Mad Dog 21/21: The Innovators’ Droll Lemma

  March 23, 2015 Hesh Wiener

  Robert Samuelson got it right, and memorably so. Last June, the Washington Post columnist characterized a spat in print between two Harvard professors as “an intellectual food fight.” The fight is over the value of business professor Clayton Christensen‘s theory of disruptive innovation, and Christensen’s adversary is history and literature professor Jill Lepore. Christensen’s theory, right, wrong, or some of each, may help explain IBM’s perplexing situation, and arguments about it are undoubtedly underway at the top of IBM. And if they aren’t they ought to be. In Christensen’s 1997 book, The Innovator’s Dilemma, he asserts

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• Tributary Flashes Backup To 60 TB Per Hour

  March 23, 2015 Alex Woodie

  Flash storage is not something you will find in the typical IBM i shop, which doesn’t get all worked up over shiny new technologies. But if a recent test that that pitted an IBM i host against an IBM FlashSystem 840 storage array–with Tributary Systems‘ Storage Director 5.0 managing traffic in the middle–is a sign of things to come, then flash may be here sooner than you think. Storage Director is virtual tape library (VTL) software that’s typically installed on an X86 server. This VTL appliance appears to its various hosts (IBM i servers, mainframes, OpenVMS, NonStop, etc) as

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• IBM i Skills Shortage: Now You See It, Now You Don’t

  March 23, 2015 Dan Burger

  A month ago when IT Jungle reported that CEO Mike Lawrie was blaming a lack of IBM i skilled professionals for a revenue shortfall at Computer Sciences Corp, the volume on this topic has been turned up considerably. That’s good. This is a discussion that needs to be heard. In the just-released IBM i Marketplace Survey, half the respondents listed IBM i skills depletion as a top concern. Much of this discussion is defined by whether a shortage exists or whether companies are doing a poor job with workforce management. “There’s only a shortage if you need them and

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• OpenPower Could Take IBM i To Hyperscale And Beyond

  March 23, 2015 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Years ago, back when the IBM i platform was called the iSeries and IBM had just caught the Linux bug pretty bad, many of us had the idea that IBM should open up the OS/400 operating system and let it be driven more directly by a community of end users. The idea was to emulate the open source community that had fostered the maturity of the Linux kernel and the many thousands of other projects that make their way into a Linux distribution. As it turns out, Big Blue is starting out with opening up the hardware and from the

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• Kisco Debuts Sub-$400 Message Monitor

  March 18, 2015 Alex Woodie

  Organizations that are looking for an affordable way to monitor their IBM i servers may want to check out the new iEventMonitor product unveiled this month by Kisco Information Systems. For less than $400, the software will automatically send an alert to administrators when it detects potential problems, as manifested through message queues. Many of the tasks that humans used to do have been automated. For example, stock brokers and assembly line workers have largely been replaced by computers and robots, respectively. In the IBM i world, the entry-level job of system operator has largely fallen by the wayside,

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• OAuth 2.0 Makes Its Way Onto the IBM i

  March 18, 2015 Alex Woodie

  Don’t look now, but OAuth, the open standard for authentication first described by Twitter for allowing people to share data without using a password, is making its way into the enterprise. It’s even becoming adopted in the IBM i ecosystem, where a number of vendors, including BVS Tools, are adopting it as a standard authentication system for IBM i communication utilities. The folks at Twitter initially started developing OAuth nine years ago to provide a way to share files over the Web without passing user IDs and passwords. Instead of sharing credentials, the OAuth protocol allows users to approve

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• Midrange Dynamics Takes Aim At Database Changes

  March 18, 2015 Dan Burger

  Multi-platform application development is often paired with modernization projects that are lighting up the project scoreboards in the IBM midrange. Companies rank modernization as one of their top priorities. Application modernizations are more business logic oriented and more frequently involve database programming as well. Midrange Dynamics, a provider of application development software and consulting services, has all this in mind with the release of a new product and an update to its reputable CMS. MDRapid, the new database tool for deploying upgrades, and Midrange Dynamics change management (MDCMS) work in concert to curtail business application downtime and risk as

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• IBM Unveils ETL Solution for DB2 Web Query

  March 18, 2015 Alex Woodie

  IBM next week will begin delivery of DataMigrator for i, a new extract, transform, and load (ETL) solution unveiled in February that’s designed to work with DB2 Web Query software. DataMigrator for i will give customers a better and more automated way to feed their IBM i-based BI and analytics applications with data originating from (gasp!) outside the platform. The ongoing explosion of data is driving organizations to adopt new business intelligence and analytics solutions designed to help grow sales, reduce costs, improve marketing, and increase customer satisfaction. While the IBM i server is typically utilized for transaction processing, it

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