• Stacking Up IBM i And Windows In The Clouds

  August 5, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  So how does the IBM Cloud running IBM i stack up against the main competition in the midrange, which is on premises Windows Server plus SQL Server from Microsoft as well as that same stack running in the Amazon Web Services cloud? We can’t give you a definitive answer, but we can give you some food for thought as you ponder how good of a deal Big Blue is giving customers who want to put IBM i on the cloud.

  Making comparisons between on premises iron and cloudy infrastructure is difficult and problematic. The good thing about a public cloud …

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• Remain Breaks New Ground With ALM Suite

  July 15, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Coding season just ended for Remain Software, the Dutch application lifecycle management (ALM) vendor with a growing US presence. That means customers are sorting through a torrent of new functionality in its flagship TD/OMS product, including improved hooks to DevOps tools like Git and Jenkins, a new cross-platform cross-reference module, and a nifty API generator too.

  New stuff started emerging from Remain Software around the POWERUp conference in May, when IT Jungle sat down with company representatives to talk about development trends, current and upcoming releases of Remain’s software, and what customers are looking to get next.

  Arguably the biggest …

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• Eradani Bridges The Gap Between Legacy And Open Source

  July 8, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  In this publication, legacy is not a dirty word or even remotely pejorative. Rather, “legacy” is just a shorthand way of delineating between applications that encapsulate decades of the evolution of a business and the transactions it processes, and all of the other new stuff that this business is also doing and perhaps coding with newer tools and programming languages.

  A new company, called Eradani, has been founded by some experts in both the IBM i world and the open source world with the express purpose of building a technical bridge so these two different cultures can see a …

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• Guru: Use SQL to Generate Random Data

  June 17, 2019 Ted Holt

  Suppose I needed to generate a large database table with random data in order to adequately test the performance of an SQL query. Suppose that, for security reasons, I was not allowed to copy the production version of the table. Suppose that I needed a way to generate a lot — and I do mean a lot! — of random data. Suppose this scenario is not mere supposition.

  Before an SQL query goes into production, it should be tested against a production-like dataset. Running a query against a test dataset of 25 rows (records) can produce unpleasant surprises when it’s …

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• Profound Marks 20 Years With A Free Dev Site For Node.js

  June 5, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Profound Logic turns 20 years old this year, a remarkable achievement for CEO Alex Roytman and his crew. But instead of receiving presents, the Dayton, Ohio, company gave the IBM i community a gift in NodeRun, a website where developers can create and deploy full-stack Node.js applications that can run in the cloud or on-premise IBM i servers. Best of all, NodeRun is free.

  Profound Logic started way back in 1999 by developing utilities for RPG programmers. As the World Wide Web continued to grow, Profound CEO Alex Roytman and company created new tools to help RPG programmers make the …

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• Speaking The SQL Lingua Franca On IBM i

  June 3, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  No matter what the job is, we all start out somewhere that is pretty far from being an expert and we depend on our elders and mentors to help us learn all the tricks and get good at the work.

  So it is with the nearly ubiquitous database query language, Structured Query Language, or SQL for short. It started out in the head of IBMer Ted Codd back in 1969, which was coincidentally when the System/3 minicomputer launched and its successor many generations later, the System/38 in 1978, was the first IBM system and the first system in the world …

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• These POWERUp Sessions Are About the Recent IBM i Announcement

  May 15, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Disneyland didn’t complete construction of Star Wars Galaxy’s Edge in time for next week’s POWERUp conference. But luckily for you, IBM did finalize its IBM i announcement soon enough for COMMON’s annual extravaganza, making next week’s show in Anaheim, California, a great chance for you to learn about the new releases of the operating system, including IBM i 7.4 and 7.3 TR6.

  According to COMMON’s online session guide, there are at least 16 sessions at POWERUp 19 having to do with IBM i 7.4, IBM i 7.3 Technology Refresh 6 (TR6), or the new software that will arrive with …

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• IBM Bolsters ACS with Database and Administrative Goodies

  May 15, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Amid the many enhancements that IBM has delivered with IBM i 7.4 and IBM i 7.3 TR6 is a new release of Access Client Solutions (ACS), which has become the go-to client interface that many IBM i professionals use to access the system for a variety of tasks. Database engineers and system administrators are the big winners with this release.

  There’s no denying that IBM delivered a whopper of release with IBM i 7.4 and its sidekick, IBM i 7.3 TR6. There’s been so much news – starting with the availability and security enhancements in Db2 Mirror and Authority Collection …

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• Guru: Emulate Control Break Reporting With DB2 For i SQL

  May 13, 2019 Michael Sansoterra

  When generating ad hoc user reports, it’s often the case that developers don’t have the time or luxury to write a high-level language program or to use a reporting tool such as DB2 Web Query or Crystal Reports to format the data appropriately. But when a user is given a raw dump of a SELECT statement’s result set in Excel, it can be quite ugly to wade through and format.

  The user may have to do things like add total rows or remove duplicate values, which can be quite time consuming. Thankfully, DB2 for i SQL offers a way to …

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• Does Db2 Mirror Kill The Market for Third Party HA?

  May 6, 2019 Alex Woodie

  IBM launched Db2 Mirror for i two weeks ago to great acclaim, as the clustering technology puts IBM i on par with how most other major systems provide continuous availability. But will Db2 Mirror destroy the platform’s heritage of high availability solutions? IT Jungle asked IBM and the biggest providers of logical replication solutions, and the answer is no. Here’s why.

  The first thing to understand about Db2 Mirror is that, at heart, it’s a database clustering technology. IBM figured out a way to make a single instance of Db2 for i run on two separate systems, in an active-active …

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