• Oft-Requested SQL Function Coming In IBM i 7.6

  April 8, 2025 Alex Woodie

  IBM i engineers and product managers have no shortage of feature requests to wade through, some of which make it into the platform and many of which do not. With the upcoming delivery of IBM i 7.6, IBM will be delivering one of the most often requested features: Support for UPDATE and DELETE statements in the data-change-table-reference clause of a SQL statement.

  While the capability to update and delete statements with data-change-table-reference may not sound like a big deal, it actually represents a significant improvement that will simplify database programming tasks for developers, according to Scott Forstie, IBM’s Db2 for …

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• RISE For SAP Could Be A Boon For IBM’s PowerVS Cloud

  March 17, 2025 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  German application giant System Analyse Programmentwicklung, better known as SAP, has spent more than five decades to deliver five major versions of application software to help companies run themselves. They are R/1 in 1977, R/2 in 1981, R/3 in 1992, mySAP.com (which became Business Suite) in 1999, SAP HANA in 2011 with its S/4HANA application suite in 2015. And today, the company has over 400,000 customers.

  As is well known, SAP wants to create an application system, which is a phrase that resonates with the OS/400 and IBM i faithful. SAP was founded by five ex-IBMers from Germany and started …

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• Rocket CDC Tool Pushes Data Out Of IBM i

  March 10, 2025 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops that need a change data capture (CDC) tool to push Db2 data off the box onto a target system, such as an Apache Kafka stream, may want to check out the new DataEdge product that Rocket Software recently announced.

  In late January, Rocket Software unveiled DataEdge, a new suite that provides a spectrum of data integration, data discovery, and data virtualization capabilities under the specific product names Rocket Data Replicate & Sync, Rocket Data Intelligence, and Rocket Data Virtualization. Some of the components in DataEdge are preexisting, while others – such as the outbound IBM i CDC …

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• Steve Will Lifts the Curtain On “Major IBM i Announcement,” But Just A Smidge

  March 3, 2025 Alex Woodie

  If you haven’t heard yet, here it is: IBM is planning to make a major IBM i announcement soon. IBM i chief architect Steve Will said as much during his recent IBM i Guided Tour. While Will shared a general outline of what IBM has in mind for the major announcement, specifics still are few and far between.

  Will, who also holds the titles of IBM i CTO and IBM distinguished engineer, teased the IBM i community with his one-hour February 12 presentation, which is titled IBM i in 2025 – A Strategic Preview. You can access a recording …

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• ARCAD Discover: Global Application Analysis With An AI Interface

  February 10, 2025 Michel Mouchon

  Here is a simple test to reckon the value of the applications that run your company. Walk down to the datacenter, or over to the datacloset, or SSH out to the cloud, and turn the physical or logical machine running those applications off. What happens next?

  Aside from a lot of animated conversations and possibly some cursing, not much until you turn the machine back on and the system, databases, and applications reboot. You already knew this, but now everyone else has discovered, rather suddenly, how the very existence of the business and the livelihoods of the employees is dependent …

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• Innovate To Deliver Your 2025 Vision

  December 4, 2024 Richard Dolewski

  IT innovation refers to the process of introducing continuous improvement by leveraging technology, services, and solutions to empower IT service delivery. Innovation involves strategically implementing holistic solutions to enhance current and future efficiency across the organization. With fast-paced technological advances (AI, Cloud, Security, Resiliency) disrupting all industries, these future outcome-based technologies create hesitation and pause to what’s achievable, required now, and relevant to your company’s strategic plans.

  Innovation must bring changes to the core delivery of IT-related services that drive increased efficiency thus making IT services delivery less costly, less time-consuming to implement, automated to improve services levels, and further …

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• Power10 Keeps Plugging Along As Power11 Looms For 2025

  November 4, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Considering how late we are in the Power10 and System z16 product cycles, things went pretty well for IBM in the respective Power Systems and System z businesses in the third quarter of 2024. While customers always look forward to future price/performance enhancements that come with a product refresh, there doesn’t seem to be anything out of the ordinary when it comes to a slowdown in sales ahead of next year’s Power11 and “Telum-II” System z17 launches.

  Business seems to be going pretty well for Big Blue, all things considered, although it had to pump $2.73 billion into its pension …

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• GenAI Interest ‘Exploding’ for Modernization on IBM i and Z, Kyndryl Says

  September 18, 2024 Alex Woodie

  There’s been an explosion of interest in using generative AI on IBM i and System Z servers, according to Kyndryl’s latest report on mainframe modernization. Hybrid IT, security, the skills gap, and observability round out the top five trends impacting the IBM midrange and mainframe platforms.

  Last year, Kyndryl contracted with Coleman Parkes Research to survey about 500 senior IT leaders at IBM i and System Z mainframe shops around the world. That effort turned into the 2023 State of Mainframe Modernization Survey Report, which we covered here.

  Many of the same modernization trends that the former IBM Global …

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• Summer of IBM i Vulnerabilities

  September 18, 2024 Alex Woodie

  IBM has patched more than two dozen software vulnerabilities in the IBM i stack over the past few months, including flaws in Merlin, MQ, OpenSSH, the Java stack, Db2, Performance Tools, and the HTTP Server (the one powered by Apache). Nine of the security vulnerabilities carry CVSS Base scores of 7 or higher, while one is above 8, making these serious security threats. If you haven’t applied the patches yet, you’re encouraged to do it soon.

  Working backwards from the most recent security bulletins, we start with September 5, when IBM issued patches for three vulnerabilities in Merlin, which officially …

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• Some Thoughts On Big Blue’s GenAI Strategy For IBM i

  August 12, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In a world that has gone half mad with generative AI, it is refreshing to see the people who control the IBM i platform being skeptical, hopeful, and practical about how the technology might be used to help the companies who choose Power Systems running IBM i as the platform for their mission critical applications.

  IBM Rochester has always been practical and often innovative when it comes to adopting hardware and software technologies, so the strategy that IBM i chief technology officer Steve Will laid out in a recent IBM i & AI – Strategy & Update as part of …

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