• Guru: Find Unused Objects On IBM i Using SQL

  May 15, 2023 Bob Cozzi

  I have a client that uses SQL iQuery for nearly all “Report” type applications since SQL iQuery Version 2. They asked if they could create a report that listed all the unused objects in their user libraries. They also wanted the option to output to Excel-compatible format if desired.

  Since SQL iQuery allows you to output the results of your SELECT statements to any of its supported formats, Excel-compatible is given.

  Note: the code for this article is avaialble on GitHub at this link.

  There were a couple of approaches. I could use our other product, SQL Tools OBJECT_LIST …

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• The Inevitable Power9 Hardware Withdrawals Begin

  May 15, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The high end Power10 machine, the Power E1080, has been out since September 2021 and the rest of the Power10 line was announced in July 2022, so the writing was on the wall for any Power9-based machines the minute that happened.

  The ability for IBM to get, much less sell, Power9 chips even if it wanted to is also somewhat dubious, too. In October 2014, IBM sold off its Microelectronics division to Globalfoundries, itself a spinout of AMD’s foundry business five years earlier mashed up with Chartered Semiconductor and backed by the government of Abu Dhabi. Here’s the complication: …

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• IBM i Pros Available for Hire from Programmers.io

  May 10, 2023 Alex Woodie

  If you’re looking for someone with IBM i and RPG skills to help modernize your applications or just to keep the lights on, you might want to consider Programmers.io. You might never have heard of it, but the Texas-based company has been in the IBM i consulting business for over a decade and has built up a considerable force composed of hundreds of IBM i experts.

  Programmers.io is an IT services and software development firm that employs over 600 engineers in the U.S. and India, about 280 of which are skilled in IBM i or RPG. The company got its …

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• Midrange Dynamics Hooks Change Management Into VS Code

  May 10, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Developers using VS Code to create native IBM i applications can now use Midrange Dynamics’s change management (CM) software to properly track their work. Midrange Dynamics North America (MDNA) announced at the recent POWERUp conference in Denver, Colorado. MDNA says Midrange Dynamics will also support Merlin in the future.

  Demand for VS Code is currently booming among the IBM i installed base, who have been clamoring for a speedier alternative to IBM’s sluggish fat client, Rational Developer for i (RDi), for a long time. Thanks to Liam Allan and his Code for IBM i extensions, which enables ILE languages in …

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• Rimini Supports IBM i Environments with New Outsourcing Biz

  May 10, 2023 Alex Woodie

  Rimini Street’s new outsourcing business, Rimini ONE, supports IBM i application environments, the company confirmed to IT Jungle. In addition to delivering application support services for JD Edwards and SAP running on IBM i, the Las Vegas company is also offering to manage the full stack of technology upon which these ERP systems run.

  Rimini Street has provided third-party support and maintenance services for a variety of ERP systems for over a decade. You may have recalled the epic legal battle it waged with Oracle, which accused the company of stealing its intellectual property in pursuit of its …

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• Four Hundred Monitor, May 10

  May 10, 2023 Jenny Thomas

  “The robots are coming! The robots are coming!” If Paul Revere were here today, he might be shouting a different kind of warning. Artificial intelligence is in the news a lot these days, and you might want to start paying attention if you aren’t already. Especially after the recent revelation directly from IBM CEO Arvind Krishna, who said Big Blue could replace up to 7,800 current employees with AI. Eeek! Read on through our Top Stories for all the AI latest from IBM. You can also get the virtual scoop on what lies ahead by listening live to IBM’s annual …

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• Cloud Infrastructure Spending Growing, But More Slowly

  May 10, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  When you look at financials, you need to think quarterly year on year to get a sense of growth over the annual and often seasonal business cycles that drive the economy. And then you also need to think sequentially so you can see when something that is growing on its own momentum, as cloud computing has been doing for the better part of a decade, shifts to a more seasonal flow.

  With the latest market figures released from hyperscaler and cloud watcher Synergy Research, whose chief analyst and managing director is John Dinsdale, dices and slices the public view of …

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• PowerHA Now Replicates To Multiple Targets Sans SAN

  May 8, 2023 Alex Woodie

  The new release of PowerHA will enable customers to use geographic mirroring to replicate their IBM i data to two or more targets. That one enhancement brings a host of benefits for customers not using SAN-based storage, including new deployment scenarios using on-prem, cloud, and hybrid topologies, as well as lower downtime for hardware upgrades, mirrored Db2 Mirror pairs, and lower RPO for tape backups.

  Prior to PowerHA SystemMirror, most IBM midrange customers who were using high availability (HA) software were using solutions based on logical replication, whereby changes to IBM i data are picked up from the local receiver …

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• Technology Always Replaces People While Augmenting Others

  May 8, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  If there is one rule of technology, it is that technology always replaces some people while augmenting others. And like religion and politics or how much money you make, it was not discussed in polite company. With the advent of machine learning-driven AI and the modern and often impolite world it was born into, this may not be the case anymore. People are talking. IBM among them.

  When IBM launched the System/360 mainframe in April 1964, it was a transformative thing for what was yet to become the computer industry. Early on, with the advent of data store and database …

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• Guru: Speeding Up RPG By Reducing I/O Operations, Part 1

  May 8, 2023 Gregory Simmons

  Perhaps one of the easiest ways to speed up an RPG program is to reduce the number of I/O operations it needs to perform. In this article let’s explore one simple method for moving toward dataset processing.

  Here I have a simple RPG program. Okay, admittedly, we don’t often get to write “simple” RPG programs, but for this example, I have stripped the RPG program down to just the read loop so I can demonstrate the conversion.

  1     Dcl-f AcctMstr Usage(*Input) Keyed;
  2     Dcl-pr entry ExtPgm('RPGRPT1');
  3       n Packed(3:0);
  4     End-Pr;
  
  5     Dcl-pi entry;
  6       inBranch Packed(3:0);
  7     End-pi;
  
  8     

  …

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