• Oracle Dips A Toe Into IBM’s EBCDIC World

  August 24, 2026 Alex Woodie

  IBM’s Ted Codd may have invented the relational database back at the Almaden Lab in the early 1970s, but it was Larry Ellison’s Oracle that offered the world the first wildly commercially successful RDBMs. Technically, the System/38 was announced, with its integrated relational database, before the first version of Oracle was announced.

  Since then, Oracle and IBM have competed intensely to win and run transactional database workloads for some of the biggest enterprises around. But there was always one key difference between the two companies’ offerings: Oracle used an ASCI character set while the IBM midrange and mainframe systems relied …

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• When Your Small IBM i Team Is Really A Team Of One

  August 24, 2026 Ash Giddings

  IBM i has long been associated with efficiency. Its reliability, integrated architecture, and low administrative overhead have enabled organizations to run critical business applications with relatively small teams. That same efficiency has created an emerging risk: in many smaller shops, operational resilience depends less on the platform itself and more on whether enough people know how to support it under pressure.

  While some IBM i shops run with a lean team of two, three, or a small handful of staff, it is not unusual for one person to be responsible for the most critical aspects of the operation. The risk …

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• Guru: Putting Failure Handling In Its Place

  August 24, 2026 Gregory Simmons

  One of the things I enjoy most about procedure-driven RPG is that it encourages us to think about responsibility. Every procedure should have a clear purpose. It should perform one task well and leave unrelated concerns to other parts of the application.

  That sounds straightforward enough, yet one responsibility often finds its way into nearly every procedure we write: failure handling.

  If you have worked with RPG for any length of time, you have probably encountered applications where nearly every procedure begins with a MONITOR operation. The procedure performs its work, catches any exception that occurs, logs an error, returns …

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• Inside The Security Enhancements In ACS

  August 24, 2026 Alex Woodie

  Keeping track of IBM i configurations and how users are using IBM i is important for security purposes. But administrators and analysts are already so overburdened with other responsibilities that it is easy to let something slip by. That is why IBM is building new SQL capabilities into Access Client Solutions, which hopefully will make it easier for IBM i shops to spot potentially damaging configs or uses before they hurt the organization.

  ACS is one of the most important tools provided by IBM for IBM i professionals, as it contains a slew of facilities for interacting with the system. …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 28, Number 28: A Crazy Number of Security Vulnerability Patches

  August 24, 2026 Doug Bidwell

  It looks like 28 is not your lucky number if you are an IBM i shop. The reason why is that in Volume 28 and Number 28 of the IBM i PTF Guide, Big Blue has released a truly amazing number of security vulnerabilities and patches for the IBM i platform. We counted 40 security vulnerabilities, some of which are still awaiting patches, plus 22 High Impact/Pervasive (HIPER) patches for firmware on Power9, Power10, and Power11 systems. But a few items before we dive into that.

  First: The System Planning Tool, version 6.26.223.0, is now available for download at …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 28, Number 29

  August 24, 2026 Doug Bidwell

  IBM laid a lot of PTF work on you last week, and this week is also a heavy one. So brace yourself. There are six security vulnerabilities in the IBM i stack and several other issues that you should be aware of. Let’s start with the random issues and then do the security issues.

  First, known issues (APARs) have been fixed for IBM i Access Client Solutions, ACS 1.1.9.15 (ACS11915), and here is the Klingon that describes it: DT498800 OSP-UNPRED MSGSSL007 – AN ERROR OCCURRED WITH AN SSL CERTIFICATE (JAVA.NIO.FILE.ATTRIBUTE.USERPRINCIPALNOTFOUNDEXCEPTION). I am not sure why they have to shout, but …

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• Inside The Encryption Key Management Changes In IBM i 7.6

  August 10, 2026 Alex Woodie

  IBM is making significant changes to how it handles encryption keys with IBM i 7.6. The big news is that IBM i shops now have bring-your-own-key (BYOK) support via IBM Key Protect for IBM Cloud offering, which scratches a certain regulatory itch. But IBM has also bolstered how it handles master keys and save/restore keys stored on the IBM i server, which boosts security, but also makes IPLs following DR events more complicated.

  Let’s start with the new bring-your-own-key (BYOK) support for IBM i in IBM Key Protect for IBM Cloud offering. IBM Key Protect is a cloud-based key management …

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• FalconStor Moved To The Blue Lagoon, And Is Poised For Growth Because Of It

  August 10, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Way back in the Dot Com boom, when FalconStor was founded, it was one of the early innovators of what we have come to know as software-defined storage and software-defined networking as well as disaggregated storage. These terms were not even coined until a decade after FalconStor was doing it in its first product, called IPStor, which is the foundation of the various products that the company still sells today.

  Like many companies, including IBM itself, FalconStor had some self-imposed business issues and financial challenges over the years – IBM in the late 1980s and the early 1990s, FalconStor in …

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• Guru: Claude’s SQL Tip

  August 10, 2026 Ted Holt

  Today’s tip comes to us from Claude, as in the AI chatbot created by Anthropic. I don’t need to introduce him. Many readers of this august publication are far better acquainted with him than I am. I have heard reports of IBM i programmers who have quit writing source code, telling Claude to write it for them. Some folks seem to be right proud of that fact. Furthermore, I’m told that some places no longer allow humans to write source code.

  I had a few ideas in mind for this article and was weighing the merits of each one when …

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• Astera Makes Extracting Legacy Report Data an AI Specialty

  August 10, 2026 Alex Woodie

  For all that large language models (LLMs) are really good at – and they are great at a few things – understanding large reports generated by IBM i servers and System Z mainframes is not one of them. A Southern California company called Astera has identified this gap and developed its own AI-based tool for extracting information from this valuable resource.

  Foundation AI models and LLMs are probabilistic systems, and they work best in the gray zones: Inputting words and images, and outputting other words and images that are similar to the originals that it was trained on but not …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 28, Number 27

  August 10, 2026 Doug Bidwell

  Welcome to this week. You have some issues with IBM i Access Client Services to deal with as well as a new security bulletin.

  Let’s start with the ACS updates, which are rolled up into ACS 1.1.9.14 and which you can read more about at this link. All prior versions are vulnerable to:

  • Arbitrary code execution on Windows when installed for all users due to publicly writeable directory and configuration file.
  • Injection of rogue certificate authority due to publicly writeable truststore.
  • Zip slip path traversal exploit when importing a configuration.
  • Versions 1.1.8.3 through 1.1.9.13 are vulnerable to downloading unverified

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• Welcoming The New IBM i Chief Architect And Other New Top Brass

  August 3, 2026 Alex Woodie

  As you have likely already heard, IBM i Chief Architect Steve Will retired last week after a 41-year IBM career, and was succeeded in that role by Kris Whitney, who previously was the IBM i platform’s chief engineer. But this is just one change among several in IBM i leadership in recent months.

  For the past four years, Will officially had three roles at IBM, including chief architect for IBM i, IBM i chief technology officer, and IBM Distinguished Engineer. The last two titles, which Will gained in 2022, were significant at the time as they denoted Will’s position …

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• A Deep Dive Into That Power S1112 Entry Power11 Server

  August 3, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The entry “Bonnell+” Power S1112 server based on the Power11 processor has been shipping for a little more than a week. While we still have not been able to get our hands on updated Power10 entry server pricing as well as the pricing on the new Power S1112, we can tell you a bunch more about the new machine even though IBM has not yet added the Power S1112 to the entry Power11 Redbook.

  The feeds and speeds of the Power S1112 were detailed on July 22 in an IBM i Guided Tour, called Next-Generation Entry Infrastructure for IBM i: …

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• Guru: Beyond Three-Part Naming – Running SQL Across Remote IBM i Systems

  August 3, 2026 Gregory Simmons

  In my article Guru: Finding Data in The Forest – Exploring Three-Part Naming In SQL, I helped you to get started with three-part naming. If you have a network of IBM i systems and haven’t availed yourself of this capability, you may be surprised at just how powerful it can be. Instead of relying on data transfers, replication, or intermediate files, SQL can reach directly into remote systems as though the data were local.

  That works well when you know exactly which remote system contains the data you need. But what happens when your network grows from a handful …

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• How IBM Bolstered IBM i Resilience In The Summer Tech Refreshes

  August 3, 2026 Alex Woodie

  The capability to weather disruptions is a hallmark of the IBM i platform and a major reason why so many companies around the world rely on it to run their businesses. To that end, IBM has enhanced the platform’s resilience capabilities as part of the recent Technology Refresh announcements with updates to Migrate While Active and the BRMS facility, as well as bringing a new VTL to IBM i.

  As mentioned in our first story about the 2026 Summer TRs, IBM has updated Migrate While Active, which it originally announced back in October 2024 as a variant of the …

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• IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 28, Number 26

  August 3, 2026 Doug Bidwell

  It is a relatively quiet week in IBM i PTF Land, which is a bit of a relief after all the stuff that was going on last week with s slew of updates and patches as well as the release of the summer batch of Technology Refreshes for the IBM i platform.

  To begin with, the latest System Planning Tool, version 6.26.212.0, is now available for download at https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/node/632531. So have at it and have fun configuring up those new Power11 machines. . . .

  We also have a new security vulnerability in the IBM i stack. Check it …

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• Power Systems Has A Great Quarter; System Z, Not So Much

  July 27, 2026 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  We have been waiting for a long time for Big Blue’s Power Systems business to get a big bump, and it looks like it has finally happened. And a handful of Fortune 100-level companies deferred their System z17 mainframe purchases as they allocated budget to buying servers for AI and generic – generally X86 machines, and certainly not from IBM – as CPU, GPU, DRAM memory, and flash storage prices are all skyrocketing. And last week, when IBM warned about this push out of System z sales, Wall Street predictably freaked all the way out, sending IBM’s stock down 25 …

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• Does AI Mark The End Of The ERP Era?

  July 27, 2026 Alex Woodie

  For decades, enterprise resource planning (ERP) software has been the backbone of corporate computing. Whether running on-prem or in the cloud, millions of businesses have relied on ERP components to automate their business processes and provide a competitive advantage. But the emergence of generative and agentic AI threatens to upend our relationship with ERP software. Where will ERP end up?

  There is no doubt that AI is improving in capabilities and reliability, often by the week. The top frontier models from companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepSeek feature reasoning capabilities that few people could have plausibly predicted would …

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• Guru: Deterministic Application Development With AI

  July 27, 2026 Dan Darnell and Eric Whitcomb

  Perhaps the key feature of AI is the way answers are obtained by virtue of a conversation with the AI. Contrast this with using a search engine where each “ask” is an independent request with a response.

  An AI conversation has context while search engine interactions do not. More and more, we use AI to create applications through the contextual, iterative, conversational process. As we have ideas we add these to the conversation and our application changes accordingly. Our customers are getting in on the action too. They are providing us with AI generated prototypes for new software or new …

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• What IBM’s Got Cooking In Db2 For i In The Summer TRs

  July 27, 2026 Alex Woodie

  Last week, IBM announced PTFs containing a slew of new Db2 for i features and enhancements as part of the Technology Refresh for IBM i 7.6 and 7.5. While the database is just a part of the story for IBM i 7.6 TR2 and 7.5 TR8, it’s a critical piece of the puzzle. Here’s a preview of the new stuff that you can now play with.

  As part of the summer TRs that we covered last week, IBM delivered five functional enhancements to Db2 for i as part of the Summer TR, shipped one security enhancement, one enhancement for …

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