• Guru: SQL Checks For Control Breaks

  April 6, 2020 Ted Holt

  A control break occurs when the combined value of one or more fields changes from one row (record) to the next when reading a data set sequentially. I used to write RPG programs with control breaks often. Now that reports are less common, I write them less often, but that’s not to say I never write a program with control breaks.

  When I first learned to handle control breaks in RPG, I used the L1 through L9 level indicators. These worked wonderfully and fed my family for several years. When I moved from the System/36 world to the S/38 (and …

  Read more

• Guru: Calling RPG Programs From Python, Part 1

  March 30, 2020 Mike Larsen

  In a prior article, I showed how to pass parameters to a Python script and execute the script from an RPG program. Based on feedback and my own curiosity, I wanted to see how I could pass parameters to an RPG program and call it from Python. After a bit of research, I found the Python interface itoolkit.

  itoolkit is an open source project provided by IBM as an interface to the XMLSERVICE toolkit, which allows us to call RPG programs, service programs, CL programs, and PASE Shell commands. itoolkit can be installed using an SSH terminal with …

  Read more

• Guru: SQL Can Generate A Series

  March 16, 2020 Ted Holt

  Most of my work is run-of-the-mill, same-old-same-old, more-of-the-same. I’m not complaining. Most of life is mundane and routine, and that’s as it should be. Too much icing ruins the cake. But sometimes I get a challenge, and when that happens, programming can be fun.

  Today’s article comes out of such an experience. I needed a table with a week’s worth of dates in it. I could have written an RPG program, but I knew that SQL could handle the task. Today I’ll show you a couple of methods that you can use to generate a series of whole numbers and …

  Read more

• Thoroughly Modern: Giving IBM i Developers A Helping Hand

  March 9, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The good thing about the Moore’s Law improvements in compute, storage, and networking capacity is that the cost of a complete IT system more accurately reflects where the real value of that system was always really derived.

  In decades gone by, the AS/400 hardware cost represented somewhere on the order of 85 percent of the cost of a server and its storage and the OS/400 systems software accounted for the remaining 15 percent or so. Over time, the hardware costs have dropped to about a third of the overall system cost as systems have also gotten incredibly more powerful. But …

  Read more

• Guru Classic: Overlaid Packed Data In Data Structures

  March 4, 2020 Jon Paris

  When I re-read this tip while looking for a “Classic” candidate, I was reminded that the underlying issue it addresses, namely how data is actually stored in an RPG program, is one that many RPG programmers don’t really have a firm grip on. That alone made it a good candidate. But perhaps even more important is demonstrating this topic to the many new programmers coming onto the platform. Unlike those of us who started off with assembly languages, C, RPG, or COBOL, modern programmers trained in C#, Python, or PHP have never had any need to understand the mechanics of …

  Read more

• Boadway’s 25-Year Performance Shows No Let Up

  March 2, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Batch jobs running a little long? Throw some hardware at it. For as long as Mike Boadway can remember, that’s been the default response to dealing with most performance issues on the IBM i server. But when today’s fast Power9 processors and Flash drives fail to move the performance needle, maybe it’s worth reconsidering Boadway’s approach to tweaking the code and the data instead.

  As the CEO of MB Software & Consulting, Boadway makes his living off solving other people’s IBM i performance issues. Since founding the company in 1995, Boadway has used his proprietary software to deliver an …

  Read more

• Guru: Practicing Safe Hex in RPG

  March 2, 2020 Jon Paris

  In this tip I’m going to address a question that arises regularly on RPG-oriented Internet lists, namely: “Is there an easy way to convert a character string to its hexadecimal equivalent?”

  One answer, of course, would be to write your own routine using lookup tables, but there is a far easier way. We can take advantage of the system’s hex MI APIs. These were originally surfaced for use by C and C++ but, thanks to the joys of ILE, can be used by any ILE language. Not only that, RPG’s prototyping support makes them really easy to use. In fact, …

  Read more

• The Gamification Of Good Coding Practices

  February 26, 2020 Nick Blamey

  There are many things that are important about creating good code, but perhaps the most important is the idea that there are good coding practices and that everyone coding, no matter what the programming language and no matter what the type of application they are creating, should adhere to some standards of quality.

  It is often the case that those have spent decades automating different aspects of businesses with systems like the IBM i and its peers have been the most resistant to brining automation to the very work they do in development and operations. But if the DevOps movement …

  Read more

• The Distinguished Professionals Of IBM i

  February 17, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We use the term legacy a lot in the IBM midrange and mainframe markets, and not necessarily in the good way we talk about political leaders or business executives or sports stars all leaving a legacy behind of their body of work. I use the term when it means something precise – legacy applications, for instance, are the ones that originated back in time and that have not been modernized in any substantial way because perhaps they don’t need to be.

  I prefer the term vintage when I am talking about hardware and software releases because that conveys a …

  Read more

• Why Koch Is Buying the Rest of Infor

  February 12, 2020 Alex Woodie

  Koch Equity Development last week announced that it has bought the remaining shares of Infor that it didn’t previously own. The move puts Koch Industries in charge of the world’s third largest ERP software company, and the IBM i market’s biggest vendor. But what, exactly, drove the $110-billion industrial conglomerate into making such an investment is the subject of some speculation.

  Infor, which has been flirting with an IPO for years, appeared to be on the fast-track for a Wall Street listing in January 2019, when it raised $1.5 billion in what, ostensibly, would be the last private equity …

  Read more

Previous Articles Next Articles