• 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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• Db2 Web Query Customers Left In The Lurch

  October 23, 2023 Alex Woodie

  The sudden collapse of the OEM agreement between IBM and TIBCO for Db2 Web Query has left users of the product in a difficult position. Where will they get technical support, updates, and fixes? Should they abandon the software? Can they sue somebody if something happens to their systems?

  These are some of the questions that IBM i shops who adopted Db2 Web Query are asking themselves in the wake of IBM’s stunning October 10 announcement to kill off the product. Effectively immediately, IBM stopped marketing and selling the IBM i product, which was an OEM version of Information …

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• Why Big Blue Is Simplifying The IBM i LPP Stack

  October 23, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If only the paranoid survive, as legendary Intel co-founder Andy Grove once quipped, then we all would pretty much have to be paranoid pretty much all the time. And this, obviously, would not be healthy. But as legendary founder of The Four Hundred, the irreplaceable and irascible Hesh Wiener, once quipped, sometimes they really are out to get you.

  And so, we come to IBM’s recent “come to Bezos” moment starting late last year that it was going to be providing subscription pricing for hardware and systems software for the IBM i platform running on Power Systems. We fully …

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• Db2 Web Query: Way More Than Just A Query Tool

  February 27, 2023 Alex Woodie

  You might be forgiven for thinking that Db2 Web Query is just a way to run your SQL queries on IBM i from a browser. After all, “Web” and “query” are right there in the name, aren’t they? But the product’s name belies the true nature of this multi-threat analytics application, which can do a whole lot more for IBM i shops than just run queries.

  IBM’s Doug Mack tackled this reality-assumption gap during a recent webinar on Db2 Web Query, which received a bunch of new capabilities with the recent version 2.4.0 upgrade. Mack, a longtime IBMer whose …

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• Data Is Streaming Into The Cloud, Including From IBM i

  November 14, 2022 Alex Woodie

  We are in the midst of a vast migration of data into public clouds, as companies seek to leverage technological innovation occurring in the cloud for competitive advantage. While there are no IBM i runtimes in the public cloud yet, IBM i shops are still getting value by moving their valuable Db2 for i data into the cloud, often using streaming technologies and tools like Apache Kafka and Apache Camel, as well as an updated ETL offering from IBM.

  It is tough to understate the magnitude of the transition to the public cloud is having on the $4 trillion IT …

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• Db2 Web Query Gets ML-Powered Insights, Cloud DW Connection

  November 2, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Organizations adopting the latest release of Db2 Web Query will find new capabilities in the graphical designer, an automated insights generation function that uses machine learning as well as new capabilities in the data migration tool that will help customers move data to cloud data warehouses, among other capabilities.

  Db2 Web Query is IBM’s flagship business intelligence offering for the IBM i platform. The software is based on WebFOCUS, the BI offering developed by Information Builders, with whom IBM has had an OEM relationship since 2007. In 2021, Information Builders was acquired by TIBCO Software, which has continued …

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• IBM Mulls Using DataMigrator as Cloud Warehouse Pipeline

  June 29, 2022 Alex Woodie

  IBMers are playing around with an update to a little-known ETL tool called DataMigrator for i that would make it easier for IBM i shops to move transactional data to cloud-based data warehousing platforms. The update would use Apache Kafka for the final connection to the cloud.

  DataMigrator ETL Extension, as the product is formally known, is an extract, transform, and load (ETL) tool created by IBM back in 2015. The product was developed to work with Db2 Web Query, the Java-based business intelligence tool that it OEMed from Information Builders (now owned by TIBCO).

  DataMigrator for …

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• COMMON Set for First Annual Conference in Three Years

  May 18, 2022 Alex Woodie

  Don’t look now, but COMMON is about to hold its first annual conference in three years. Starting on Monday in New Orleans, POWERUp 2022 will be the biggest gathering of the IBM i community since the pandemic started more than two years ago. There is still time to register for the conference, which will feature a raft of presentations on the newly released IBM i version 7.5.

  COMMON’s annual conference scheduled for the New Orleans Marriott next week is shaping up to be a good one. More than 100 speakers are scheduled to present more than 300 sessions on …

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• Big Blue At Your Power Systems Service

  February 14, 2022 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  IBM may have spun off its managed services and system hosting businesses into Kyndryl, but it still has a sizable remaining technical support, systems integration, technology consulting, business transformation, and application operations business that represents close to 40 percent of its revenues. And so it is very keen on selling Power Systems shops all kinds of services.

  To that end, IBM made two announcements last week regarding the Power Systems hardware platform.

  The first, in announcement letter 222-033, is a new plan to offer Software Maintenance – what IBM i shops and resellers and even IBM itself usually call …

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• The Mod Squad Comes Together to Modernize Old RPG

  October 6, 2021 Alex Woodie

  In the early 70s, a group of fictional social misfits joined up to solve crimes on the hit television series The Mod Squad. Now a group of real-life IBM i professionals of the same name are uniting to solve an equally pressing problem: modernizing old RPG code, including some that dates back to the 1970s.

  “You’ve heard of IBM‘s upward compatibility,” says Rich Ollari, an IBM i veteran who is one of the ringleaders of the new Mod Squad. “Code that ran back in the 80s, even the 70s, is still running today, and that’s what we’re fighting with. …

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