• Say Goodbye To Downtime: Update Your Database Without Taking Your Business Offline

  May 5, 2025 Donna Westmoreland

  Downtime is costly, impacting productivity, revenue, and customer trust. For retailers and financial institutions, even a few minutes can mean significant losses. This is why enterprises rely on IBM i Db2 for mission-critical systems. IBM i offers 99.999 percent availability, high stability, robust failover strategies, and real-time monitoring to reduce unplanned downtime.

  However, planned downtime for critical updates and projects is also necessary. The challenge lies in scheduling this maintenance and upgrades without disrupting business applications. So, how can we utilize new functionality and optimize systems with minimal disruption?

  Database File Updates

  It is not surprising that businesses tend to …

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• The Top Ten IBM i Requests From The IBM Ideas Portal

  April 2, 2025 Alex Woodie

  Big Blue is gearing up for a major new release of the IBM i operating system. We don’t know yet what will be in the release, but we can forge some guesses by checking out what new features the IBM i community is requesting through the IBM Ideas portal, and how IBM reacts to them.

  IBM prides itself on being a customer-focused organization, and so it looks to the IBM i community for direction on what sort of features, capabilities, and fixes the IBM i community currently is looking for. That community outreach takes various forms, including the COMMON Americas …

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• Guru: AI Pair Programming In RPG With GitHub Copilot

  February 17, 2025 Gregory Simmons

  If you have been meaning to give VS Code a try, but just haven’t had a chance, I encourage you to avail yourself today. Yes, for you RDi users, it will take a little bit to migrate your favorite settings, code snippets, and compile commands – but I promise, you won’t regret the move.

  In my article, Getting Started With The Code 4 i Extension Within VS Code, I offer a few more insights to help get you started. And if you are an SEU user, yes, the switch may seem daunting, but one of the great things about …

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• 2025 IBM i Predictions, Part Three

  January 27, 2025 Alex Woodie

  What will happen this year in the little neck of the IT wood that we call the IBM i community? It’s hard to say for sure, but one thing is certain: It sure a lot of fun guessing what might happen or what could happen! And who knows? Some of these predictions may actually come true.

  After 20 years with IBM i software vendor PKS Software, Heidi Schmidt has seen a thing or two in the midrange. There have been many ups and downs over the years, and a wide array of names. But Schmidt is bullish that the …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 27, Numbers 3 And 4

  January 27, 2025 Doug Bidwell

  We are finally getting back into synch between The Four Hundred and the IBM i PTF Guide, and with this week’s issue numbers 3 and 4, you will be all caught up.

  In Number 3, dated January 18, we note that IBM has put out the latest service pack 950.D0 for system firmware levels VL950, VM950, and VH950, which you can read all about here. The updates are available for the following Power9 machines:

  • Power System S914 (9009-41G)
  • Power System E950 (9040-MR9)
  • Power System E980 (9080-M9S)
  • Power System H922 (9223-22H)
  • Power System H922 (9223-22S)
  • Power System H924 (9223-42H)

  …

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• Beta For RPG Coding Assistant On Track for 2Q25

  January 20, 2025 Alex Woodie

  IBM is ramping up development of the AI-based RPG Code Assist and expects to have a working prototype ready for testing by the end of the first quarter, IBM i chief technology officer Steve Will said in a webinar last month. The goal is to have a beta ready for during the second quarter and general availability hopefully in the second half of the year, he added.

  Large language models (LLMs) such as OpenAI’s GPT and Google’s Gemini have taken the world by storm, and companies are investing tens of billions of dollars in the nascent tech to gain …

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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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• How To Have The Wisdom Of Experts Woven Into Your Code

  October 14, 2024 Nicholas DeLessio

  No matter how far you are down the road with your DevOps automation journey, or even if you’re not yet starting that journey, it’s probably a good idea to have a code checker; not everyone can have a Linus Torvalds review their work (as famously happens with the open source Linux kernel), but there are automation tools available for various languages and platforms that do static code analysis and they are the next best thing.

  These tools, sometimes called “code linters” (because they remove the fuzzy bits out of application logic like actual linters remove imperfections stuck to our clothing), …

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• Remain Bolsters Development Options with TD/OMS

  September 18, 2024 Alex Woodie

  Remain Software recently rolled out a major upgrade to its change management software for IBM i. The big enhancements with TD/OMS 16.1 include the availability of Remain’s Web-based development framework, dubbed Octo, as well as support for the popular Web-based IDE, VS Code.

  Remain Software introduced Octo more than two years ago as a lightweight Web-based framework to unite its various IBM i offerings. Short for Open Core for Technology Orchestration, Octo was initially put forward as a way to integrate and display information from other Remain Software applications, such as TD/OMS, Gravity, API Studio, and MiWorkplace, its lightweight, Web-based …

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• IBM Clarifies Where It’s Going with IBM i Subscriptions, Product Realignment

  September 11, 2024 Alex Woodie

  As an avid IT Jungle reader, you’re probably aware that IBM is moving its IBM i software stack from a traditional licensing scheme to one based on subscriptions. The company is in the middle of the move at the moment, and it’s also in the middle of a product realignment, which has been the source of some confusion. IBM hosted a webinar recently that helped to clarify where it’s at now with the shift to subscriptions and the product realignment, and where it’s going in the future.

  IBM first announced back in May 2022 that it was shifting to subscription-based …

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