• Digging Into the Latest IBM i TRs

  October 23, 2019 Alex Woodie

  The fall batch of Technology Refreshes (TRs) have been revealed, and as expected, there’s a bit of new functionality available for customers who use IBM i 7.3 and 7.4. In this story, we’ll tackle enhancements in open source, systems management and monitoring, and development, which means we’ll dive deeper into other areas, like database and HA/DR, in a future story.

  Let’s start with the fun stuff: open source. With IBM i 7.3 TR7 and 7.4 TR1, IBM has brought support for two prominent open source projects, including ZeroMQ and Redis.

  ZeroMQ is a universal messaging library that allows users to …

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• Data Protection in the New Regulated Era

  October 23, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Companies must protect their data from all sorts of threats these days, including power outages, failed servers, and drive crashes. But one of the most important aspects of data protection today is ensuring the security and privacy of data, which is mandated by a slew of emerging data regulations.

  In May 2018, the European Union enacted the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a far-reaching new law that gave people sweeping new rights over their data. While GDPR ostensibly just impacts EU citizens, many large companies in the U.S. and other countries adopted new security and privacy processes to ensure consistence …

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• IBM Lab Services: Your IBM i All-Star Team

  September 16, 2019 Alex Woodie

  It can be difficult to deploy brand new, cutting-edge technology on an IBM i server for the very first time. Take Db2 Mirror, for example. IBM just released it two months ago, and nobody has much experience deploying it in a production setting as yet. This is exactly the sort of project that spurred IBM to create Lab Services.

  Lab Services is an All-Star team of IBM consultants who are called upon to deploy the newest or most complex technologies. In addition to high availability, Lab Services consultants are engaged in projects around cloud and hybrid cloud, database modernization, and …

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• Guru: Finding Large Files With Python

  July 15, 2019 Mike Larsen

  It’s always a good idea to purge files that aren’t needed any longer. Chances are that you already have procedures in place to purge data from Db2 files and tables, but what about files that reside in the IFS? Do you have a good solution for keeping the IFS clean?

  Perhaps you have old order files stored in the IFS. If you work for a large company, these types of files can accumulate quickly. I’ve written processes in the past to remove files from the IFS using RPG, but I’d like to offer an alternative. I’m going to show how …

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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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• 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 i PTF Guide, Volume 21, Number 19

  May 15, 2019 Doug Bidwell

  So, here’s the deal: There is a new IBM i 7.3 Cume! 19116! C9116730! Have fun with the latest cumulative release on the newest shipping variant of IBM i, all rolled up and ready to rock. Also, SAP on i PTF links have been added to each release and, by the way, I installed Technology Refresh 6 for IBM i 7.3 earlier this week at a customer site and there were no issues, which is a good thing indeed. There is also a new DB2 Group for IBM i 7.3.

  Be sure to check out the SAP on i Blog, …

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• NodeRun Is Node.js For Everyone

  May 13, 2019 Brian May

  (Sponsored Content) Working for a software development company like Profound Logic, I have the privilege of working on very interesting and exciting projects, both internally and with my customers. My days are filled with both the mundane and the exciting, but luckily, I have more of the latter than the former. I want to take a few minutes of your time to tell you about a project that has me as excited as I have been in quite a while.

  Have you wanted to experiment with learning Node.js on IBM i, or any other platform? Have you …

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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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