• Threading The Needle Of Power8 Performance

  June 2, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  I am going to take a break from the price/performance comparisons between earlier Power machines and the new Power8 systems and talk about something a little bit different from but still intimately related to the performance that customers can expect from the latest IBM i operating system releases as they run on the new iron and on older Power7 and Power7+ machines. The issue is threading, and IBM has done some pretty clever things to help the operating system and processors juggle more work and boost throughput. Most modern processors have some form of simultaneous multithreading, or SMT,

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• The IBM i Journal Cache Sweeper Knob

  May 28, 2014 Joe Hertvik

  After publishing my latest article on improving IBM i journal performance with journal caching, IBM Rochester Software Engineer Chad Olstad wrote in with the following comment, which expands on journal caching and offers an alternate view of journal caching’s relationship with commitment control. “I wanted to point out the one thing you did not mention in the article is the cache sweeper knob, which controls how [old] stale cached journal entries are allowed to be before they are flushed to disk. [The cache sweeper knob] can be customized by the user as of V6R1 via [the Change Journal Attributes

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• DB2 for i 7.2 Functions, Functions, Functions

  May 28, 2014 Michael Sansoterra

  In this tip about new DB2 for i 7.2 features, I’m going to cover some noteworthy news about user-defined function (UDF) features. The feature list includes how a function name is now resolved based on casting rules, named parameters, parameter defaults and array parameters. Function Name Resolution From the earliest days of V4R4 when user-defined functions became available, I’ve had a BIG pet peeve. That pet peeve is how DB2 tries to figure out what function you want to use. For a little background, remember that a function can be overloaded. That means scalar UDF ConvertDate can be defined

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• The Geezer’s Guide to Free-Form RPG, Part 3: Data Structures and More Data Definitions

  May 28, 2014 Jon Paris

  In my previous tip on the new free-form RPG support I discussed the basics of the new methods for defining data in RPG. In this tip I will be covering some additional aspects of the new style data definitions that are not so obvious from a simple reading of the documentation. More on Data Definitions Until now, if you wanted to ensure that all fields of a specific type (currency for example) used a common definition, you used the LIKE keyword. The one small problem with this was that you could not change the data type of the cloned field.

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• Big Data Accelerates 2013 Software Market; IBM Absent From Top Spots

  May 27, 2014 Dan Burger

  Are we there yet? The year-long trek that determines whether the software market gained or lost in 2013 is over. And the trip gets two thumbs up for the gains made. However, IBM was locked out of the leader position in all of the software categories. The worldwide software market grew 5.5 percent during 2013, rocking and rolling to a total market size of $369 billion, according to the numbers crunchers at IDC. According to the paid observers at IDC, Europe’s economic recovery and a better than predicted outcome in the US, lifted software revenue past its high water

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• Are You A Tactician Or A Visionary?

  May 27, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Are you a tactical IT shop, or a visionary one that has figured out not only how to implement cutting-edge technology, but convince your organization to keep plowing money into systems and software? If you want your company to make more money, a forthcoming survey from IBM suggests you need to have a vision. At the Edge2014 event hosted by IBM’s Systems and Technology Group in Las Vegas last week, general manager Tom Rosamilia, who is familiar to the IBM i community as a former general manager running the Power Systems division before he was moved on up to the

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• IBM Has No Retirement Party Planned For Tape

  May 27, 2014 Dan Burger

  There’s nothing heavier than the burden of a great legacy. Instead of continued expectations, the predominant bias is to push aside proven products for newer, flashier, must-be-better replacements. Magnetic tape storage is one of those products that proves what’s old is actually new. If you know someone who believes tape has reached the end of its capacity, bet them a cheeseburger and a beer that it hasn’t. Few people know this better than Mark Lantz, manager of exploratory tape storage technologies at IBM‘s research facilities in Zurich, Switzerland. He will show you a deeply researched feasibility of tape roadmap

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• IDC Revises 2014 Global IT Spending Projections Downward

  May 27, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When it comes to global IT spending, any shift of a percentage or two means a shift of tens of billions of dollars up or down. The prognosticators at Gartner took their IT spending projections down a notch a few weeks ago, and now the economic forecasters at IDC have taken a look at the situation and have followed suit. Specifically, the Worldwide Black Book now says that IT spending across the world will rise by 4.1 percent as measured in both constant currencies and in US dollars. IT spending worldwide across hardware, software, and services rose by 4.5 percent

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• Reader Feedback On We’re Integrated, We’re A Platform

  May 27, 2014 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Two thoughts: The AS/400 (world’s single best brand dumped in the trash) wasn’t as integrated as IBM claimed. From a command line, why did I need to STRQSH to get a console for POSIX commands, or STRSQL to get a console for SQL commands? If I remember correctly, there are not any conflicts in command names. Yes, to a OS/400 newbie the king of Three Letter Acronyms would seem strange, but not any stranger than the operating system from AT&T extended by Berkeley CS students strung out on small pharma. SED? AWK? GREP? Are you kidding me? But maybe they

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• IBM i Finds A Place In The Cloud

  May 27, 2014 Dan Burger

  The IBM cloud game plan has a three-pronged strategy. It involves building its own private clouds and filling them with customers who appreciate the solid infrastructure and the services that IBM brings to the table. It is also developing a robust business model of being an infrastructure provider to business partners that are eager to create their own cloud business models. The third prong is a mix of private and public cloud options, operating systems, and virtualized infrastructure, which comes under the heading of hybrid cloud. IBM i tends to be a niche in the big picture, just as we

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