• PASE Versus ILE: Which Is Best For Open Source?

  October 22, 2018 Alex Woodie

  Open source has emerged as a driver of innovation in the past 20 years, and has greatly accelerated technological innovation. The proprietary IBM i platform has also benefited from this trend, thanks in large part to the capability to run Linux applications in the PASE runtime. But some members of the IBM i community are concerned that the fruits of the open source innovation have not tasted quite as sweet as they do on other platforms.

  Linux was the original breakout star in open source software, and so it should be no surprise that the vast majority of software developed …

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• The Five Hottest IBM i RFEs Of The Quarter

  April 2, 2018 Alex Woodie

  You should know by now that IBM wants your input on new features for IBM i. Anybody with a valid IBM ID can submit their ideas – anything, really – through the new Request for Enhancement (RFE) process it put in place over a year ago. Now that the first quarter of 2018 is officially in the books, it’s a good time to check in with the RFE submissions and see kind of new stuff IBM i users have dreamt up to enhance the midrange server platform at the center of this community.

  Here are the top five new RFEs, …

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• Tooling Around With IBM i Access Client Solutions Announcements

  February 21, 2018 Dan Burger

  Access Client Solutions (ACS) received several feature/function enhancements when the Technology Refreshes were announced last week with a little something for end users, system administrators, and database engineers. Although nothing stands out as a major item, this is an incremental release fulfilling user-requested features.

  The 5250 emulator is a good example. It’s a key technology that is likely the most used component in ACS, but it’s been around for so long it’s easy to think there’s nothing new in emulation. But users never seem to cease to ask for something new: support for Chinese CCSID 1371 is one of those …

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• New IBM i Technology Refreshes Announced; Available Mid-March

  February 14, 2018 Dan Burger

  IBM yesterday announced that Technology Refresh 8 (TR8) for IBM i 7.2 and TR4 for IBM i 7.3 will provide support for Power9 hardware, enhancements for RPG, security enhancements, and a variety of new capabilities for licensed products. The support for Power9 will be covered elsewhere in this issue of The Four Hundred. Here, we’ll provide an overview of the IBM i operating system, licensed programs, and software.

  When TR enhancements include RPG, I like to begin there. Application developers using Rational Development Studio should take note of the new operation code referred to as DATA-INTO, which adds the …

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• More Database Tools Highlight Latest IBM i Access Client

  September 18, 2017 Dan Burger

  Remember IBM i Access for Windows? Many IBM i advocates do because they never stopped using it, despite its replacement by IBM i Access Client Solutions more than four years ago. Access for Windows hasn’t seen an enhancement since ACS arrived and ACS is on a continual enhancement schedule. The most recent round of upgrades arrived in mid-July without much fanfare, which is the way IBM seems to prefer.

  SQL developers and database engineers (those that have the title and those that only have the responsibility) are among the professionals benefiting the most from the expanding ACS toolset that usually …

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• Guru: SQL Table Functions Can Do Non-function Things

  May 1, 2017 Ted Holt

  We IBM i developers owe a great debt to Scott Forstie. He’s responsible for the wonderful DB2 for i Services and IBM i Services, which give us SQL interfaces for many functions of the operating system. Like IBM, we can write SQL interfaces to help us with non-database tasks. I recently did exactly that.

  While I can’t say that I never use the Start SQL Interactive Session (STRSQL) command, I can say that I prefer to use GUI SQL clients, in particular the Run SQL Scripts utility that is part of IBM i Access Client Solutions (ACS). I do get …

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• ACS Getting New Database Schema Functions

  March 29, 2017 Alex Woodie

  IBM is adding more functionality to the upcoming release of Access Client Solutions (ACS) that should make IBM i database engineers and database developers very happy, including a new capability that allows users to work directly with schemas.

  The database schema function was not on the list of new ACS features that IBM released back in February, when it first unveiled IBM i 7.3 TR2 and IBM i 7.2 TR6. IBM uses the major operating system and technology refresh (TR) announcements as a vehicle to also announce other products that aren’t part of the OS proper, but which are …

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