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Top Ten Things To Know Before Heading To COMMON
May 1, 2017 Alex Woodie
More than a thousand IBM i professionals from around the world will descend on Universal Orlando next week for COMMON’s Annual Meeting and Exposition. Besides the chance to “Party with Harry” (as in Potter, the boy wizard), the conference taking place from May 7 to 10 provides us all a chance to learn about the latest IBM i technologies, explore new solutions, and commiserate with our fellow midrangers.
With more than 300 sessions on everything from RPG and PHP to Watson and the cloud, the annual COMMON get-together is the largest IBM i conference on the planet. It’s been that …
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Surround Tech Keeps IBM i Websites Hip to the Times
April 26, 2017 Alex Woodie
The World Wide Web has changed considerably since the first websites went live more than 20 years ago, and many IBM i shops have struggled to keep up. One midrange vendor helping IBM i shops adapt to the times is Surround Technologies, which has morphed its Web application development environment, called Accelerator, into a full content management system.
In today’s world, having a functional and good-looking website has become a business necessity. In many instances, the website becomes a portal that allows customers, business partners, and employees to access important documents or submit information. In others, the website has effectively …
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Guru: SQL Facts Of UNION And ORDER BY, Take Two
April 17, 2017 Ted Holt
Hey, Ted:
In last week’s tip, you mentioned that expressions are not allowed in the ORDER BY clause of a union. You can use the union as a subquery to allow the use of an expression for the ordering. An extra layer, but it gives you the result you are looking for.
–S. Sims
Sims is correct. I was so focused on the fact that the ORDER BY of a union does not allow expressions that I completely forgot about a workaround. His (her?) technique is probably the most common way to deal with this limitation. I’ve seen numerous examples …
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Time To Get Your 2FA On, IBM i Admins
April 3, 2017 Alex Woodie
System administrators working in regulated industries will soon be required to sign-in to servers using two-factor authentication (2FA), according to the latest PCI requirement. The industry regulation will impact administrators working with all types of computer systems, and will likely be enforced in late 2017 or early 2018, security experts say.
In prior versions of the Payment Cardholder Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS), only remote administrators were required to use 2FA, which bolsters the security of the sign-on process by requiring users to show “something you know,” like a password, as well as “something you have,” like a hardware …
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Guru: The XML Composition Conundrum of XMLNAMESPACES or XMLATTRIBUTES
April 3, 2017 Michael Sansoterra
Hey, Mike:
After reading the IT Jungle Guru tips on DB2 XML Composition (see Related Stories below), I’ve been able to build XML from relational data. I have everything working but now I need to enclose all data in a “Document” tag after the XML declaration like the example here:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <Document xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns="http://MyCompany.com" xsi:schemaLocation="http://MyCompany.com validate.xsd">
I tried using XMLNAMESPACES but can’t get it to produce the “xsi:schemaLocation” tag. How can I construct the document tag I need?
–N.C.
The problem here is that the xsi:schemaLocation in your example is not a namespace, but …
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Mad Dog 21/21: iBird In The Hand Or iToo In The Bush
April 3, 2017 Hesh Wiener
IBM i shops seem to be pretty content with their systems. Profiles of the installed base, such as that recently published by HelpSystems, show a mix of old and new equipment with an impressive span of performance. For users, the stability of the base is sign that owners of the systems are satisfied. But for IBM, ISVs and other suppliers, an i that is not evolving is a dead duck. Suppliers to the IBM i market want the platform to become a phoenix, a fresh system rising from the ashes of aging predecessors.
In the past month, we …
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SystemObjects SmartPad4i Mobilizes RDi
April 3, 2017 Dan Burger
As more companies find their way into the RDi development environment, more ISVs realize plug-ins to RDi are in demand. SystemObjects just joined the list by offering an RDi plug-in to its Web and mobile application development tool known as SmartPad4i. For situations where Web development skills are still evolving, SystemObjects is offering a route that bypasses the Java and HTML learning curve. And there are always RPG and COBOL programmers who don’t mind that detour.
SmartPad4i is not new. But the plug-in to RDi and the built-in capability to create HTML files are interesting enhancements. IBM i developers with …
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IBM i Has A Cup Of Coffee With Watson
March 20, 2017 Dan Burger
As IBM steers its cognitive computing technology toward a profitable business process necessity, we are feeling the presence of Watson in the IBM i community. IBM’s business-oriented path forward for Watson should be well-suited to the “i for Business” installed base, or at least that portion of the installed base that believes IT is a competitive advantage.
Analysts foresee a river of business software flowing from embedded cognitive capabilities. They say deeper data analysis leading to smarter workflow efficiencies have the attention of business managers. And they predict three-quarters of new business software will include artificial intelligence features by …
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Conditional SQL I/O, Take 2
March 20, 2017 Ted Holt
Bob writes, “Hey, Ted! I hope you can teach an old dog a new trick. I am trying to replace the CHAIN operation with SQL. I chain once to a file to read a certain record. If that record is not found, I chain again to retrieve a default record. How can I make SQL do a second read to the same file?”
This is not a hard thing to do, as SQL has no problem joining more than once to the same table. I’ll show you two methods to retrieve your data. The first method is the easier one, …
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Security Awareness: Eight More Patches For IBM i Vulns
February 27, 2017 Alex Woodie
National security awareness month isn’t until October, but that didn’t stop IBM from issuing a torrent of patches this month to address all kinds of security problems in its products. For IBM i specifically, Big Blue patched eight flaws found across the OpenSSH and OpenSSL libraries for the three IBM i OSes under support. The Power HMC also received numerous security patches, as did dozens of other IBM products.
OpenSSL and OpenSSH have been the source of numerous security vulnerabilities over the past three years, ever since the Heartbleed flaw was found in OpenSSL. As more flaws are found in …
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