TFH Volume: 28 Issue: 25 Archives

The Five Hottest IBM i RFEs Of The Quarter

April 2, 2018 Alex Woodie

You should know by now that IBM wants your input on new features for IBM i. Anybody with a valid IBM ID can submit their ideas – anything, really – through the new Request for Enhancement (RFE) process it put in place over a year ago. Now that the first quarter of 2018 is officially in the books, it’s a good time to check in with the RFE submissions and see kind of new stuff IBM i users have dreamt up to enhance the midrange server platform at the center of this community.

Here are the top five new RFEs, …
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Unintended Consequences: When Software Installations Go Off The Track

April 2, 2018 Dan Burger

It’s not like we never hear about the positive benefits of software upgrades or new software installations. There is no shortage of case studies that tell those stories. But the unintended consequences that gut punch implementations get a fair share of attention wherever IT professionals gather. These are usually complex and expensive projects where anything that goes wrong is magnified, but wounded projects know no boundaries. Workflow barriers, surprising conflicts, and disappearing functionality curse projects of all descriptions.

Do you have an implementation specialist on staff or a trusted consultant to lead you to software implementation victory, or do you …
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Guru: LTRIM + RTRIM > TRIM

April 2, 2018 Ted Holt

When IBM enhances SQL for my favorite database management system, I feel so happy I could dance like Karlos Klaumannsmoller selling diabetes medicine. It is my pleasure today to let you know (in case you don’t already know) that IBM has once again enhanced two SQL functions to make them as powerful as their RPG counterparts.

The functions to which I refer are LTRIM (left trim) and RTRIM (right trim). Until recently these functions could only remove blanks (or hexadecimal zeros, for some data types) from the beginning (left) or end (right) of a string. IBM recently added …
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Power9 Servers Get Legacy Adapter Support

April 2, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

It takes an ecosystem to put a system into the field, and not everything that needs to be an option on a system is available on the Day One launch. To that end, IBM this week announced some legacy PCI-Express peripherals for linking into Fibre Channel SAN and traditional SAS storage on the new Power9 “ZZ” entry systems that were announced back in February and that started shipping a few weeks ago.

In announcement letter 118-043, we see the first item is a pair of Fibre Channel adapters that uses the older PCI-Express 2.0 protocol to deliver 8 Gb/sec …
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Pay Attention To JDK And WebSphere Release Support

April 2, 2018 Timothy Prickett Morgan

IBM i shops don’t have to use Big Blue’s WebSphere Application Server middleware to create Java, since some of the Java functions are built into the Apache Web server built into the operating system and open source programs like the Tomcat server, while not still supported, are nonetheless sometimes still used. Still other shops don’t go for the full-on WebSphere Application Server, but use the Express Edition that is bundled on the machine to provide a certain level of automation for Java workloads.

IBM has been warning customers that they have to keep current on Java Development Kit (JDK) releases, …
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The Five Hottest IBM i RFEs Of The Quarter

Unintended Consequences: When Software Installations Go Off The Track

Guru: LTRIM + RTRIM > TRIM

Power9 Servers Get Legacy Adapter Support

Pay Attention To JDK And WebSphere Release Support

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