• Liam Allan Shares What’s Coming Next With Code For IBM i

  June 23, 2025 Alex Woodie

  The rise of Code for IBM i arguably is the best IBM i technology story of the past few years. The VS Code development environment came out of nowhere to challenge Rational Developer for i as the pre-eminent developer tool on the platform. And according to Liam Allan, who started this whole thing, Code for i is only going to get better in the months and years to come.

  There is clear and unmistakable momentum behind VS Code and Code for IBM i, the VS Code plug-in that Liam Allan created back in 2021 while working at Seiden Group …

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• Meet The Next Gen Of IBMers Helping To Build IBM i

  June 16, 2025 Alex Woodie

  The graying of the IBM i installed base is a topic that deserves attention, as every platform must find a way to reinvent itself if it wants to survive. IBM executives have been vocal about the need for IBM i customers to hire younger people. Well, it looks like Big Blue is taking its own advice, judging from the new crop of developers working in the Rochester and Toronto labs, and beyond.

  It’s hard to believe that Liam Allan has been working on the IBM i platform for nearly a decade. Allan, who started working on IBM i when he …

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• Guru: Creating An SQL Stored Procedure That Returns A Result Set

  May 12, 2025 Mike Larsen

  Continuing to build out the stored procedure series, I’m going to show how to create an SQL stored procedure that returns a result set. This is very similar to the previous article where I showed how to do this using RPG. In this example, we’re just using pure SQL to achieve the same results.

  I created an SQL script (Figure 1) that selects all rows from the Departments table. The SQL statement is the same as the one I used in the RPG program from the prior article, but I’ll describe it again here. I didn’t add any selection criteria …

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• 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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• Guru: Creating An RPG Stored Procedure That Returns A Result Set

  March 17, 2025 Mike Larsen

  In the previous article, I showed how to create an RPG stored procedure that uses parameters. In this article, I’m going to show how to create an RPG stored procedure that returns a result set, as we would likely encounter this scenario more frequently. The data used in this example comes from the Department table from IBM’s Sample database.

  I created an RPG program (Figure 1) that selects all rows from the Departments table. I didn’t add any selection criteria as I know there aren’t many rows in the table, but you may want to limit the number of rows …

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• Security Top of Mind as Massive Hacks Continue

  December 4, 2024 Alex Woodie

  The calendar indicates peace and joy, but instead a sense of dread and fear permeates business, as the number and scope of security breaches grows and new regulations loom on the horizon. Ransomware, in particular, is proving itself to be a thorny issue for companies of all sizes, including IBM i shops.

  The latest mega-hack involved Chinse state actors infiltrating the American telecommunications backbone, where they not only accessed huge numbers of call detail records (CDRs) – which they used for counter-espionage purposes – but also read text messages and listened to Americans’ phone calls.

  Known as Salt Typhoon, the …

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• IBM’s Fall 2024 Code for IBM i Enhancements

  November 13, 2024 Alex Woodie

  Adoption of Code for i continues to soar among IBM i developers, as they shift from heavy, expensive integrated development environments (IDEs) to lighter, open-source options. With the latest Technology Refreshes (TRs) for IBM i, IBM is making the VS Code plug-in even more useful for RPG and COBOL developers.

  Code for IBM i is the brainchild of Liam Allan, the midrange wunderkind with an intense aversion to Rational Developer for IBM i (RDi), IBM’s Java-based flagship IDE for IBM i. As adoption of the VS Code extension grew in the summer of 2022, IBM smartly hired Allan as a …

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• Another GenAI-Powered Testing Tool Comes to IBM i

  November 6, 2024 Alex Woodie

  IBM says it’s bringing a new AI accelerator to the Power line to drive compute-hungry generative AI workloads, such as the new RPG coding assistant that it’s also developing. But IBM won’t be the only source of such GenAI-powered coding assistants, as a company called Abstracta recently announced another one.

  There’s a lot of interest in the Spyre accelerators that IBM announced earlier this year for the System z mainframe and which IBM announced last month during its TechExchange conference will be coming to Power. Considering the massive demand for Nvidia GPUs, which could plug into past generations of Power …

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• IBM Bolsters Db2 for i With Tech Refreshes

  October 23, 2024 Alex Woodie

  IBM is delivering a handful of new database capabilities with the latest batch of Technology Refreshes for IBM i 7.5 and 7.4, including new function to create Universally Unique Identifiers (UUIDs), new capabilities for the security data mart, and various enhancements to SQL-based IBM i Services.

  A UUID is a random 36-character, 128-bit alphanumeric string that can be used to identify something, such as a row or table in a database, with near certainty that the identifier is unique, has never been used before, and will never be used again.

  The UUID system was first implemented by the Open Software …

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