• Maxava Puts Up Another $50,000 For iFoundation Grants

  July 7, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  High availability software vendor Maxava has generously opened up its checkbook and for the fourth year in a row has committed funds for the Maxava iFoundation to help support efforts to bolster the IBM i community. The iFoundation was set up by the New Zealand company, which now has a presence around the globe, four years ago because the company’s managers wanted to actually do something to promote the community. Specifically, iFoundation makes grants to not-for-profit organizations promote the IBM i platform and support activities that are involved with the exchanging of knowledge, skills, or ideas about the IBM i

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• As I See It: Midlife With Crisis

  July 7, 2014 Victor Rozek

  If you want to screw up your life, there’s nothing like a Midlife Crisis to provide handy justification. The affair with the younger woman, followed by spending quality time with the wife’s attorney; the outlandish purchase, after which your kid discovers she won’t be going to Stanford after all; and the cosmetic surgery that makes your face unresponsive to human emotion. These are some of the ingenious ways we’ve developed to cope with the unavoidable process of aging. Having said that, sometimes a properly managed Midlife Crisis can save your life. But more on that later. The Midlife Crisis is

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• The New Normal For The IBM i Job Market

  July 7, 2014 Alex Woodie

  The Great Recession may be over, but it has become clear that the job market has transitioned to a “new normal” that is defined by a lack of full-time jobs across many industries. In the IT industry, and specifically in the IBM i niche, employers still largely have the upper hand in setting terms, while employees are increasingly forced to make due with part-time, temporary, and contract work. “We’re just not seeing the jobs like we used to see,” says Bob Langieri, the CEO of Excel Technical Services, a job placement company based in Orange County, California. “I’ve been

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• Still A Community Of Common Interest

  July 7, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Whenever we come upon the anniversary of the launch of the AS/400, which passed on a week when The Four Hundred was off on hiatus, most of us are inclined to contemplate and celebrate the genius of the system and the adventurous techies inside of IBM who took a lot of cool ideas about how a system should be designed and created a platform that made it possible for midrange businesses to do sophisticated things without having a lot of propellerheads on their staff to make it all work. This is a very top-down view of the AS/400 and its

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• HelpSystems Grows With RJS And Coglin Mill Acquisitions

  July 7, 2014 Dan Burger

  HelpSystems has picked up two more IBM i independent software vendors to add to its product portfolio. Last week, the acquiring minds at HelpSystems added document management software company RJS Software and the data warehousing product from Coglin Mill into its product ShowCase, which already includes systems automation, security, and business intelligence software. I estimate the RJS customer base is approximately 1,500. Coglin Mill’s customer count is maybe 150. With HelpSystems’ worldwide customer base at 8,800 before these acquisitions, it seems likely that the company will top more than 10,000 customers. Around 75 percent of those customers are considered IBM

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• DB2 for i 7.2 Features and Fun, Part 1

  June 30, 2014 Michael Sansoterra

  The dump truck of database features driven by IBM is delivering yet again, unloading a full load of great enhancements for the beloved DB2 for i RDBMS. In addition to the new features included in the various IBM i 7.1 technology refresh (TR) releases, 7.2 has even more security, developer, and administrative friendly enhancements that I’ll be discussing in this and future tips. TRUNCATE TABLE The TRUNCATE TABLE statement is used for deleting all of the rows in a table in one fell swoop. You can think of this statement as SQL’s version of the Clear Physical File Member (CLRPFM)

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• Admin Alert: Reorganizing IBM i Files To Improve Disk Performance, Part 2

  June 25, 2014 Joe Hertvik

  Last issue, I began putting together a template for detecting and efficiently reorganizing physical files on IBM i partitions. I covered the most common reasons administrators reorganize files and demonstrated a procedure for detecting which files on your system need reorganization. This week, I’ll complete the process by reviewing different ways to reorganize files and look at some techniques for file reorganization while the file is active. Steps To Effectively Reorganizing Files As I discussed last time, here are the steps to follow for an effective disk reorganization strategy. Set up a procedure for identifying files and members that need

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• Here’s More Help For A Huge Hardship

  June 25, 2014 Ted Holt

  In the April 16, 2014, issue of this august publication, I shared how encoded vector indexes can help with the task of summarizing data from large tables. Tom McKinley of IBM graciously emailed me with more information about that technique, and it is my pleasure to pass Tom’s wisdom along to you. Assume two tables–one of items, one of sales. create table Items ( Item char (12) not null, Description char (25), Cost dec (7,2), Price dec (7,2), primary key (Item)) create table Sales ( ID integer as identity, Invoice dec (9,0), Line dec (3,0), InvoiceDate date, Customer dec (7,0),

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• Quadrant and BCD Re-Align Partner Programs

  June 17, 2014 Alex Woodie

  Quadrant Software and its new subsidiary BCD Software last month rolled out a new business partner program that’s aimed at re-aligning the two companies’ formerly separate reseller programs into a single program. One of the benefits that Quadrant cited in its February acquisition of BCD was access to a broader product portfolio for both companies’ reseller channels. Quadrant has a big presence in the document management and fax routing business, with its Formtastic and QuadraDocV offerings, while BCD’s claim to fame is developing IBM i-based Web and mobile apps with its WebSmart platform (although it offers a number of point

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• Oracle Brings Big In-Memory Speedup to JD Edwards Apps

  June 17, 2014 Alex Woodie

  Oracle says the new column-oriented in-memory capabilities of its 12c relational database will make JD Edwards and other compatible ERP applications run 100 to 1,000 times faster compared to using the traditional row-oriented version of the database. The new in-memory options that Oracle CEO Larry Ellison unveiled last week are geared not only toward online analytic processing (OLAP) workloads but also online transaction processing (OLTP) that are the bread and butter of ERP workhorses. Oracle says it clocked 100x to 1,000x speedups while it was testing its new Database In-Memory capability against certain modules of its E-Business Suite, JD Edwards,

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