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  • POWERUp 2025 –Your Source For IBM i 7.6 Information

    May 12, 2025 Alex Woodie

    The IBM i community is getting ready for the biggest event of the year, the COMMON Annual Conference, better known as POWERUp 2025. The event, which is being held next week at the Disneyland Hotel in Southern California, is chock full of information relating to IBM i 7.6, the latest release of the operating system.

    It seems like just yesterday the IBM i community was convening on Fort Worth, Texas, for what would be one of the largest and most positive COMMON events in recent memory. In particular, IBM and COMMON were successful in attracting a substantial contingent of …

    Read more
  • Maxava Consulting Services Does More Than HA/DR Project Management – A Lot More

    May 12, 2025 Yvonne Enselman

    IT organizations have been having to do more with less for so long that it is frankly amazing that anything at all gets done some decades later. And the funny thing is that the To Do list just keeps getting longer – and wider – as the years go by.

    We know exactly how short-staffed and over-burdened IBM i shops are, and that is why Maxava is launching Maxava Consulting Services, a new arm of the high availability software maker that aims to provide a broad and deep set of strategic and tactical services to help IBM i shops get …

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  • Guru: Creating An SQL Stored Procedure That Returns A Result Set

    May 12, 2025 Mike Larsen

    Continuing to build out the stored procedure series, I’m going to show how to create an SQL stored procedure that returns a result set. This is very similar to the previous article where I showed how to do this using RPG. In this example, we’re just using pure SQL to achieve the same results.

    I created an SQL script (Figure 1) that selects all rows from the Departments table. The SQL statement is the same as the one I used in the RPG program from the prior article, but I’ll describe it again here. I didn’t add any selection criteria …

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  • Rocket Celebrates 35th Anniversary As Private Equity Owner Ponders Sale

    April 28, 2025 Alex Woodie

    Rocket Software has come a long way since Andy Youniss and Johan Magnusson Gedda founded the company in Youniss’ Boston garage in 1990. Today the company counts more than 12,000 customers, including a large number of IBM i shops, and reportedly has a valuation of around $10 billion. Could the company’s 35th anniversary of its founding be a good time for its current majority owner, Bain Capital, to sell?

    Youniss started building what we now think of as Rocket Software in 2000, when he completed the first of what would become dozens of acquisitions. Over the years, there would be …

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  • Using AI To Derive Application Intelligence And Drive Modernization

    April 23, 2025 Marc Dallas

    Everybody in the IBM i space knows that Big Blue is working on a coding assistant based on generative AI models to help developers write better and more consistent RPG applications with what everyone assumes will be a smaller and smaller programming talent pool.

    But there is more to leveraging AI as a tool for application development and modernization than this. There are those who want to be able to use GenAI tools that can analyze and convert code from one language to another – much as the same large language models were first trained to translate between two languages …

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  • Guru: Unlocking The Power Of %CONCAT And %CONCATARR In RPG

    April 14, 2025 Gregory Simmons

    When working with strings in RPG, especially in modern free-format code, the %CONCAT and %CONCATARR built-in functions (BIFs) offer efficient and readable solutions for combining strings. These functions simplify the process of concatenating multiple string values, making your code cleaner and easier to maintain. In this article, we will explore how they work and demonstrate their practical applications.

    The %CONCAT BIF allows you to combine multiple strings. It’s a more efficient and readable alternative to traditional concatenation using the + operator.

    Here’s a simple example:

    **Free
    Ctl-Opt Main(CONCAT_1) ActGrp(*Caller);
    
    Dcl-Pr pause ExtProc('sleep');
      time_to_sleep Uns(10) Value;
    End-Pr;
    
    Dcl-Proc CONCAT_1;
    
      Dcl-S firstName 
    …

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  • Is IBM i Ready for the Agentic AI Revolution?

    March 24, 2025 Alex Woodie

    The AI world moves fast. Just when you get your head around large language models (LLMs) and the chatbots and coding co-pilots they enable, the AI world has moved onto something new. In 2025, that something new is the reasoning model, which is enabling autonomous AI agents and the world of agentic AI.

    Is IBM i ready for the revolution that’s about to unfold?

    By now you have undoubtedly read about LLMs such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Meta’s Llama. These LLMs are popular ways to power text-based generative AI applications, such as chatbots, coding co-pilots, and question-and-answer …

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  • Government Mainframes Versus DOGE: Showdown At The COBOL Corral

    March 17, 2025 Alex Woodie

    Elon Musk is a force of nature, slashing the federal payroll through the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). But the government’s IBM mainframes are immovable objects in their own rights, lasting the test of time. If Musk and DOGE are serious about reforming how the government does business, the government’s legacy systems will pose a serious challenge.

    As the head of DOGE, Musk has ruffled plenty of feathers with his comments and his actions, including firing federal employees en masse and wielding a large “chainsaw for bureaucracy” given to him by Argentine President Javier Milei, an ally of President Donald …

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  • Guru: Creating An RPG Stored Procedure That Returns A Result Set

    March 17, 2025 Mike Larsen

    In the previous article, I showed how to create an RPG stored procedure that uses parameters. In this article, I’m going to show how to create an RPG stored procedure that returns a result set, as we would likely encounter this scenario more frequently. The data used in this example comes from the Department table from IBM’s Sample database.

    I created an RPG program (Figure 1) that selects all rows from the Departments table. I didn’t add any selection criteria as I know there aren’t many rows in the table, but you may want to limit the number of rows …

    Read more
  • Guru: AI Pair Programming In RPG With Continue

    March 10, 2025 Gregory Simmons

    In my last article, I shared a brief introduction to the GitHub Copilot extensions. These extensions provide an easy way to get up and running with an AI coding assistant to aid you in your RPG development. Being cloud based, it’s lightweight in terms of system resources, but it does cost a little money per month, per user.

    For this article, I would like to share with you what I have learned about a newer extension for VS Code named Continue. Continue runs locally on your PC, is 100 percent free, and as of this writing, is the leading …

    Read more

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  • POWERUp 2025 –Your Source For IBM i 7.6 Information
  • Maxava Consulting Services Does More Than HA/DR Project Management – A Lot More
  • Guru: Creating An SQL Stored Procedure That Returns A Result Set
  • As I See It: At Any Cost
  • IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 27, Number 19
  • IBM Unveils Manzan, A New Open Source Event Monitor For IBM i
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