• IBM Chops Power7+ Processor Prices On Flex Iron

  August 26, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If you are shopping for a new two-socket Flex p260+ server node, then good news. IBM just slashed the prices on the processor cards on three out of the four processor card features that were announced with the machines earlier this month. As The Four Hundred previously reported, IBM trotted out three new server nodes in the Flex System chassis on August 6. Apparently IBM is unhappy with the pricing of the 7895-23A processor cards, which were aimed specifically at IBM i shops and which have two Power7+ processors running at 4 GHz, each with two cores. But the

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• Reeder Feedback On A New IBM i Team Is Needed

  August 26, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Dan: Quite often I pass the articles around from IT Jungle. This one caused quite a stir in our organization–in a good way. My eyes were opened. I learned that management does not understand the difference between “big data” and “data centric programming” vs. “application programming.” I am the database engineer here (a brand new position), and we are going through some growing pains as a result. But, we are in a perfect storm to embrace the challenges. I am looking for a good article, in plain English on data centric programming. Thank you and keep up the good

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• Avnet’s Solutions And Services Strategy Adjusts To IT Buying Changes

  August 26, 2013 Dan Burger

  We’ve heard it from IBM and all the major analyst companies: companies are no longer buying products; they are buying solutions. IT vendors that have depended on hardware sales for the bulk of their revenue are shifting to a more services-oriented style. Just two weeks ago, at the Avnet Compass conference for the business partners of that giant IT reseller, the services story was emphasized again and again. The way organizations consume IT is changing. Avnet is changing, too. There was a time when Avnet’s business on the IT side–it also has a large electronics components business, of course–was mostly

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• As I See It: The Rats Are Coming

  August 26, 2013 Victor Rozek

  There are many good reasons why a pack of rats is also referred to as a mischief. They are opportunistic, breed like Kardashians, can chew through just about anything including steel, and host some nasty pathogens including Yersinia pestis, a micro-organism found in fleas responsible for the Bubonic Plague. Rats jump, climb, swim, and can hold their breath for up to four minutes. They’re tough enough to have survived 10 years of atomic testing on Eniwetok Atoll in the South Pacific. And if that’s not enough, they’re quick learners. They can learn to navigate a maze, solve problems, and

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• Synon Founder Breathes New Life Into Lazy Software

  August 26, 2013 Alex Woodie

  Simon Williams, who created the Synon/2E and Obsydian 4GL development tools that were so popular during the AS/400’s heyday, is back at the helm of Lazy Software, the company he founded in 1998 to develop and market a revolutionary associative database. Williams rejoined Lazy Software in 2010 after the company and product foundered about for several years, and now he is shipping a new release of the database, Sentences 4.0, and gearing up to tackle big data problems. Lazy Software got off to a big start in 1998, the same year that Synon sold itself to Sterling Software, which

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• One Power 750 Matches Two Xeon Servers On SAP BW Test

  August 26, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  For many years now, IBM has been very keen on using various data warehousing benchmark tests based on applications from German software giant SAP to show the relative scalability of Power Systems running OS/400, i5/OS, and IBM i, and to make comparisons to other systems. Now, IBM has perhaps won a throwdown with Hewlett-Packard. Last year, when HP was trying to show off the performance of its ProLiant DL580 G7 servers running SAP code and using the HANA in-memory database from SAP to support its Business Warehouse data warehouse, the company chose the Business Warehouse Enhanced Mixed Load benchmark,

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• IBM To Divulge Power8 Processor Secrets At Hot Chips

  August 26, 2013 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  It is late on a Friday night after a hard week, and I have to be up at some awful hour to catch a plane at JFK to get myself to San Francisco in the morning. (The flight boards at 6:20 a.m. for a 7 a.m. takeoff, and I would be lying if I said that Delta Flight DL629 was not a little familiar to me after a few years.) But I don’t care about all that, and I don’t care about being tired because if there is one thing I love, it is going to Hot Chips once a

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• Which Job Is Filling Up My System Storage?

  August 21, 2013 Hey, Joe

  Every so often, our system storage breaches its threshold level, and we have to find the job that is filling up storage before it crashes our system. This is usually a race against time. Do you have any tips on how to quickly find runaway jobs that are gobbling up storage? –Mike I feel your pain on this one. Hitting the threshold can be a recurring event in some shops, and it’s always better to find out sooner when this problem occurs rather than later. Here’s how I handle this issue. Set Your ASP Threshold At A Reasonable Level On

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• Join The Queue With Open Access

  August 21, 2013 Jon Paris

  Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here. It has been a while since my last tip on RPG Open Access and now that everyone running IBM i V6 or 7 has access to it for no additional cost, I thought it was time to revisit the subject. OA handlers operate in one of two modes: buffer and names/values. The buffer option performs better, but requires the handler to know the layout of the data in the buffer in advance. Names/values (NV) handlers, such as the one I introduced in the previous article, do not

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• Override Default Data Types In The SQL Descriptor

  August 21, 2013 Hey, Mike

  Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here. I’d like to use SQL Descriptors in an embedded SQL program to read column data into host variables. However, if my host variable type doesn’t match exactly the parameter or column data type then I receive an SQL0076 error: “DATA or INDICATOR item not correct.” How can I, for example, receive the data from a CHAR(10) column from the SQL descriptor into an RPG varying-length character 20 variable, without using an explicit CAST in the SQL statement? –J.B. AUTHOR’S NOTE: If you’re unfamiliar with SQL descriptors, please see

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