• IBM i Momma Bear Retires

  December 4, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Alison Butterill is probably the most famous IBM i visage in the world. For as long as we can remember – which is not necessarily any kind of test we realize – Butterill has been front and center, calming and thoroughly explaining the IBM i platform, being the interface between customers and engineers steering its development, and being its official spokesperson alongside of IBM i chief architect Steve Will.

  We are sad to report that Butterill retired as worldwide IBM i offering manager from Big Blue on November 30. And in a manner that is absolutely consistent with her calm …

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• Guru: The Transition From Modern RPG IV To Modern SQL

  October 30, 2023 Bob Cozzi

  Seven or eight years ago I was working with a client who needed more contemporary reporting than provided by the legacy Query/400 product. Initially I looked at Db2 Web Query and realized the documentation was sparse and the tutorials for most things, even “getting started” were virtually non-existent. It was also about four times more expensive than I felt it was worth to a P05 or P10 client. I mentioned the documentation issue to the folks at IBM and they agreed. Some of it was eventually resolved, but not enough in my opinion to get the masses to replace Query/400 …

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• The Science Of Lifting And Shifting To The Cloud

  October 11, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Companies in Japan have a long and deep history with IBM computing systems, both its mainframe and its midrange platforms. And in some cases, they have moved from one to the other to maintain the IBM style of integrated systems while attaining the benefits of what many customers still consider the more integrated, less expensive, and easier to use platform that Big Blue offers: Namely, the AS/400 launched in 1988 and its progeny up through the current IBM i generation.

  Such is the case with Kosei Securities Co Ltd, which was founded way back in 1961 in Osaka, a …

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• IBM Suddenly Pulls The Plug On Db2 Web Query for i

  October 11, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Well, that was a bit of a surprise, but to be fair we had a few days of forewarning about it before it happened so it really wasn’t. Yesterday, on October 10, IBM abruptly announced the end of marketing for all variations of the Db2 Web Query for i data analytics tool. You can read about it in announcement letter AD23-0691. But don’t get too excited. That announcement letter doesn’t tell you much.

  On Friday, October 6, we got a message from a director of information technology at a logistics and business services provider that his IBM business partner …

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• 40 Years Of DB2, But Even More For That No-Name Database Embedded In The System/38

  October 2, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Last week, Big Blue celebrated the 40^th anniversary of the launch of its Database 2 relational database management system for its venerable System/370, System 308X, and System/390 mainframes. It is now called Db2, because marketing people can’t leave anything alone, and even though we now have this thing called Db2 for i, IBM didn’t mention this red-headed stepchild of a relational database as part of its celebration.

  Not even once. And that’s just fine by us because the integrated relational database management system that has been the heart of our venerable System/38 and its progeny was never DB2/400 or …

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• In The IBM i Trenches With: Maxava

  September 20, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The IBM i market is a big animal, even here in 2023 more than three and a half decades after the launch of the AS/400, and that means you have to take a lot of pulses to get a sense of what that animal is doing and how it is doing.

  This week, we are talking with John Dominic, who is global vice president at high availability and system monitoring software maker Maxava. Dominic has spent his life in the greater Philadelphia metropolitan area, and, like many people in the IBM midrange, was cultivated very locally even though he …

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• Facing The Challenges Of Upgrading Old Systems With The Cloud

  September 18, 2023 Jason Hardy

  If you are one of the many IBM i shops that has always created its own applications and that has a long history of investing in the AS/400, iSeries, System i, and IBM i platforms over the past three and a half decades at reasonably regular intervals to keep the hardware and the systems software current, you have it relatively easy and we definitely want to talk to you about your move to the cloud and how we might help.

  But if you are one of the many OS/400 and IBM i shops that have, for myriad reasons, gotten stuck …

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• Say Sayonara To The IBM i Integrated Server

  August 21, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  One of the neat things about the AS/400 platform and its progeny is that it takes integration seriously, even to the extent of wrapping the OS/400 and IBM i platform around competitive platforms to bring them into the fold. The File Serving I/O Processor (FSIOP), which became the Integrated Netfinity Server, which became the Integrated xSeries Server, which became the IBM i Integrated Server is a good example of this.

  This integrated server approach brought a real, discrete, physical X86 server running Windows Server, OS/2, Novell NetWare, or SCO Unix under the skins of the AS/400 and IBM i Server. …

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• Don’t Have A Conniption If Big Blue Goes All Subscription

  August 14, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Big Blue has been pretty clear that it is not only going to put Power Systems machinery in its own cloud as well as those run by its business partners, but that it going to offer hardware and systems software alike under a cloud consumption model with as much of a unified pricing scheme, based on subscriptions, for on premises, IBM Cloud, and partner cloud deployments.

  As we have already reported back in February, the IBM i operating system and its integrated Db2 for i relational database is already available under subscription pricing, which includes the license to use the …

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• Sticking To The Backroads On This Journey

  August 7, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Things are getting progressively weird in the computer business, and with lots of travel over the past two weeks up and down the East coast for vacation and for visiting family, I have had a lot of time to think about things. It’s so weird that I really don’t want to play the radio. I just want to keep us safe on the highways and have my thoughts. Parse a few things, suss them out, see how they might fit together and in what particular configuration.

  Because time is of the essence, I have been largely on the interstates, but …

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