• Melding System Monitoring And Capacity Planning

  April 24, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  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.

  There are many …

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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

  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, SQL, and a complete …

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

  March 25, 2019 Tom Huntington

  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 our job listings don’t …

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• Guru: Why A Function Was There But Could Not Be Found

  March 25, 2019 Ted Holt

  Hey, Ted:

  I am stuck on trying to create a function in RPG to use in SQL. I based it on your FMTDATE function, which I successfully installed and is working great! I have been trying to get this function working for five hours and I am at my wits’ end. Hopefully, you will notice something right away.

  –Andrew

  The message that Andrew was receiving was SQL0204 (HISFUNCT in *LIBL type *N not found). (I have replaced the name of Andrew’s function with HISFUNC.) Yet the function existed and the service program existed. There was nothing wrong with Andrew’s RPG …

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• Guru: When Playing With SQL

  March 18, 2019 Paul Tuohy

  One of the questions I have been asked a lot at conferences is “How do you figure out x in SQL?” In this article, I will discuss four things I use a lot when playing with SQL in Run SQL Scripts: VALUES, SYSIBM.SYSDUMMY1, global variables, and the system catalog.

  VALUES

  When I am trying to figure out how an SQL function works, my first port of call is the VALUES statement. VALUES derives a result directly from an expression. For example, the following statement:

  values upper('paul');
  

  Would generate the following result set:

  

  You can specify more than one value in …

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• Five Acquisitions You May Have Missed

  March 13, 2019 Alex Woodie

  The New Year has started off with some wheeling and dealing, as some software company owners look to bulk up while others look to hand off responsibility to somebody else. Those operating in the IBM i marketplace aren’t alone in making acquisitions. Here are five under-the-radar deals in the midrange that you may have missed.

  Attunity‘s line of real-time data integration software will now be sold through Qlik, which acquired the publicly traded company in a $560-million in late February. It was a natural enough move for Qlik, the well-regarded BI vendor that was acquired by private equity …

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• Guru Classic: What’s That Name, Again?

  March 6, 2019 Paul Tuohy

  Author’s Note: This article was originally published in February 2013. I recently had to hunt out this article when visiting a client. The content is even more relevant as the use of SQL stored procedures continues to grow.

  One of the great things about writing articles and tips is that people will drop you a note to ask a question or tell you how much they liked (or disliked) what you wrote. But even better is when someone drops you a line to let you know they have taken what you wrote and extended it.

  Such was the case with …

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