• RPG Code Generation And The Agentic Future Of IBM i

  June 2, 2025 Alex Woodie

  IBM is making progress with Watsonx Code Assistant for i, which is on track to become available as a public preview next month. And while IBM perhaps is running into some challenges with generating RPG code, the long-term potential of agentic AI on IBM i is brighter than ever.

  As we previously reported, IBM is now taking names for the folks who will be given access to the public preview of WCA for i, which you can sign up for here. According to IBM i CTO Steve Will, the preview will deliver RPG code understanding capabilities, which is …

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• Public Preview For Watson Code Assistant for i Available Soon

  May 21, 2025 Alex Woodie

  At the COMMON POWERUp 2025 conference this week, IBM pulled the covers back a bit on Watson Code Assistant for IBM i, the new name for the AI-powered coding assistant that IBM first started talking about one year ago. A public preview of WCA for i is becoming available to a limited number of testers, with general availability expected in the second half of the year.

  There has been quite a bit of development in the IBM i coding co-pilot this month. On May 7, during the IBM Think conference, two IBM executives wrote a blog post announcing WCA for …

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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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• IBM Unveils Manzan, A New Open Source Event Monitor For IBM i

  May 5, 2025 Alex Woodie

  IBM developers have created a new open source event monitor for IBM i. Dubbed Manzan, the project, which was spearheaded by IBM i open source guru Jesse Gorzinski, promises to provide a versatile way to ingest and redistribute a variety of IBM i event data types to downstream tools, thereby consolidating event monitoring for a wide range of use cases behind a single pane of glass.

  There are no shortages of ways that users can monitor what is going on in their IBM i server. There are job logs to look at, message queues to inspect, and even stream files …

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• 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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• How IBM Improved The Database With IBM i 7.6

  April 28, 2025 Alex Woodie

  Developers have a host of new database functions to play with in IBM i 7.6 and 7.5 TR6, not the least of which is the new data change table reference functions. In addition to that big new feature, IBM is bringing updates to SELF, enhancements to parallel execution of SQL statements, and 10 new IBM i services, among others.

  The Db2 for i database is the beating heart of the IBM i platform, storing, processing, and serving data to all of the IBM i applications. While other databases are available on the platform (MySQL, MariaDB, and Postgres) through the AIX …

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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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• The New Capabilities IBM Added To Navigator For i

  April 23, 2025 Alex Woodie

  The addition of multi-factor authentication (MFA) to IBM i 7.6 is the big news with the recent operating system update from IBM. But IBM has introduced new capabilities to other parts of the platform as well, and some of the biggest reside in Navigator for i.

  As the strategic Web-based console for administrating the IBM i server, it’s natural that Navigator for i gets lots of attention. Whether you’re looking to monitor or manage the databases, inspect batch jobs, configure security, or monitor performance, Navigator for i is the one central place that lets you do it. You can, of …

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• Oft-Requested SQL Function Coming In IBM i 7.6

  April 8, 2025 Alex Woodie

  IBM i engineers and product managers have no shortage of feature requests to wade through, some of which make it into the platform and many of which do not. With the upcoming delivery of IBM i 7.6, IBM will be delivering one of the most often requested features: Support for UPDATE and DELETE statements in the data-change-table-reference clause of a SQL statement.

  While the capability to update and delete statements with data-change-table-reference may not sound like a big deal, it actually represents a significant improvement that will simplify database programming tasks for developers, according to Scott Forstie, IBM’s Db2 for …

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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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