• IBM Bolsters ACS with Database and Administrative Goodies

  May 15, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Amid the many enhancements that IBM has delivered with IBM i 7.4 and IBM i 7.3 TR6 is a new release of Access Client Solutions (ACS), which has become the go-to client interface that many IBM i professionals use to access the system for a variety of tasks. Database engineers and system administrators are the big winners with this release.

  There’s no denying that IBM delivered a whopper of release with IBM i 7.4 and its sidekick, IBM i 7.3 TR6. There’s been so much news – starting with the availability and security enhancements in Db2 Mirror and Authority Collection …

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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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• Drilling Down Into Db2 Mirror for IBM i

  May 6, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We did our initial coverage of the new Db2 Mirror for the IBM i operating system’s integrated database two weeks ago, and now it is time to dig in a little deeper. Elsewhere in this week’s issue of The Four Hundred, we have gotten feedback from the suppliers of high availability clustering and disaster recovery software for the IBM i platform as to how Db2 Mirror compete with as well as complements their wares. And in this story, we will be digging a little deeper into Db2 Mirror itself.

  As we explained, Db2 Mirror creates an active-active database …

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• How IBM i 7.4 Improves Security

  May 1, 2019 Alex Woodie

  The unveiling of Db2 Mirror may have gotten the lion’s share of attention with last week’s introduction of IBM i enhancements. But IBM has also given its customer base some significant security upgrades with the new releases of IBM i, including enhancements to the Authority Collection and support for the latest over-the-wire encryption protocol.

  “Our big things are around those two main themes – availability as well as security,” says Alison Butterill, IBM i product offering manager at IBM. “Those are the two main themes. But we have lots of things across the board.”

  IBM gave customers significant new user-focused …

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• Melding System Monitoring And Capacity Planning

  April 24, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  (Sponsored Content) Installing a modern system to run enterprise applications is a pretty tough task, but the job is not done once the iron is in and the databases and applications are up and running. Sophisticated organizations, whether they are large or small, do sophisticated application and system monitoring to keep an eye on how things are running, they have job schedulers that synchronize work to optimize for performance as well as drive up system utilization, and they use all of the information gathered to better plan for the kinds of systems they will need in the future …

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• IBM i Announcements Loom, and So Does POWERUp 2019

  April 15, 2019 Alex Woodie

  By now you probably know that IBM is making its next round of IBM i announcements next Tuesday, April 23, via a COMMON webcast. But what you might not know is that COMMON has more than a dozen sessions about the yet-to-be-disclosed announcements planned for the upcoming POWERUp 2019 conference taking place next month at Disneyland.

  “Right now we’re looking at about 15 or 16 sessions about the announcement itself,” COMMON Executive Director Manzoor Siddiqui tells IT Jungle. “We’re going to be the first conference where people will have access to the knowledge and the content around that.”

  On …

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• Raz-Lee Reels In The File Editors

  April 10, 2019 Alex Woodie

  File editors can be great time-savers in certain situations. Who wouldn’t want developers to be able to quickly get into a database file, fix some errors, and then jump back out? Clearly, the answer is the security department. But thanks to a new solution from Raz-Lee Security called iSecurity Safe Update, file editors can be used without giving the security officer nightmares.

  File editors are among the most popular products on the IBM i platform, thanks to their capability to developers and administrators to make changes to data quickly and easily, without requiring programming. The IBM i operating system comes …

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• Guru: Dealing With RPG Errors and Embedded SQL

  April 8, 2019 Ted Holt

  Hey, Ted! I’m having trouble using some of the new techniques I learned at the RPG and DB2 Summit. Below is a screen shot of a program I am writing. I cannot figure out why the compiler doesn’t like it. Can you see anything that would be causing the declarations to fail?

  — Mike

  I glanced over Mike’s code and noticed that he used a correlation name in the SELECT and WHERE clauses, but did not define that correlation name for any of the tables, like this:

  SELECT x.onefield, x.twofield, x.redfield, x.bluefield
  FROM MYTABLE
  WHERE x.onefield = :TestValue;
  

  He …

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• Attention Synon Users: You Can Automate Your Move To RPG Free Form And DevOps

  April 3, 2019 Philippe Magne

  (Sponsored Content) Depending on who you ask, there are about 1,000 IBM i shops that used the CA 2E (Synon) CASE tool to create their applications and are still using this tool to maintain those applications. This is not an easy task any more, and there is a much better way.

  After three years in development and very stringent testing with five early adopter Synon shops, ARCAD Software is rolling out what it calls Modernization as a Service, or MaaS for short, which seeks to completely automate the move from Synon generated code to modern RPG Free Form, …

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• Five Skills You Don’t Need To Manage IBM i (And Two You Do)

  March 25, 2019 Tom Huntington

  (Sponsored Content) Much has been said to debunk the myth of an IBM i skills shortage or decry it as a disappearing act. Yet, year after year, respondents to the annual IBM i Marketplace Survey by HelpSystems list IBM i skills as a top concern. The results also show that organizations are addressing these concerns by adding automation, modernizing development, and getting rid of obsolete technology that breeds the dreaded word: legacy.

  But why do we on IBM i continue to carry the perception that so-called “IBM i skills” are scarce? Is it because the keywords in …

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