• Guru: Debugging Common Table Expressions

  October 21, 2019 Ted Holt

  I cannot say enough good things about common table expressions. Words like wonderful and marvelous don’t begin to describe them. However, CTEs do add a bit of complexity to an SQL query, and when the result set doesn’t contain the correct results, any common table expression can be the culprit. Fortunately, debugging queries with common table expressions is not difficult.

  To illustrate what I mean, let’s assume we have a query that retrieves shipment information for one day. It involves a few tables:

  • a one-row table containing a shipment date
  • a table of shipment header information
  • a customer master table

  …

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• Monoliths, Microservices, and IBM i Modernization: Part 2

  October 14, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Microservices are the future, right? After reading part one of this series, you can be excused for thinking that. Breaking up applications into smaller components brings clear benefits to both the development and operations staff, and clearly is an architectural approach that has a lot of momentum. But it turns out there might be practical limits to how far the microservices approach can take us.

  “Loosely coupled, yet tightly integrated.” That phrase became something of a running joke at an Infor conference attended by this reporter several years ago. The company at the time was betting heavily on its ION …

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• IBM i 7.2 End Dates Revealed as Power7 Shutdown Looms

  September 18, 2019 Alex Woodie

  IBM surprised nobody last week when it announced that it will stop selling IBM i 7.2 next April and cease supporting the operating system a year later. The lead time should give IBM i shops plenty of runway to prepare their upgrade strategies and transition to newer versions of the operating system. A potentially more impactful deadline for those not paying close attention is the end of hardware support for Power7 boxes in less than two weeks.

  Last week’s announcement of end of sales and support for IBM i 7.2 and related software products was not unexpected. That’s because IBM …

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• PTC Completes Database Support In Implementer

  September 11, 2019 Alex Woodie

  As a change management tool, PTC’s Implementer is well-regarded among IBM i users for its ability to track development tasks and smooth out the promotion process. While the product has mostly been used to track source code in programming languages like RPG and Java, customers have increasingly been putting business logic into Db2 for i. With the recent launch of Implementer 12.3, PTC has wrapped up planned enhancements for the database.

  PTC‘s Implementer provides a full range of capabilities for managing development processes for IBM i shops. The software works closely with IBM‘s Rational Developer for i (RDi) …

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• Fresche Hires Database Modernization Expert

  September 11, 2019 Alex Woodie

  IBM i database modernization expert Birgitta Hauser has a new software house to call home following her hiring at Fresche Solutions. The new gig marks the start of a new era in the German’s 20-year career on the IBM i, and adds to Fresche’s growing arsenal of midrange talent.

  IBM i shops around the world are under pressure to either modernize their systems or migrate to something newer. While IBM i applications largely do what they were designed to do, the requirements have changed, and the siren call of digital transformation and big data analytics is too hard for …

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• Guru: I’m A Number, You’re A Number, Everybody’s A Number

  September 9, 2019 Ted Holt

  Do you, like Bob Seger, sometimes feel that you are nothing more than a number? Me too. That’s because to many people, that’s exactly what we are. And if there’s one thing that computers are good at, it’s assigning numbers — to orders, to accounts, to invoices, to transactions, and of course, to people. Since we have to make the computer assign numbers, we may as well learn the modern way to do it.

  In my earliest days of programming, I would store the last assigned of a series of numbers in a data file. (The S/34 and S/36 …

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• 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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