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Get Your Git On, IBM i
August 8, 2016 Alex Woodie
Git has officially come to IBM i. Last week, IBM released a program temporary fix (PTF) that includes binaries for an IBM i version of the popular open source change management tool that was announced as part of IBM i 7.3 earlier this year. Along with Git, IBM also released a PTF for Orion, a new Web-based IDE that works with Git and can be used to code free-form RPG from a tablet.
There’s been a lot of talk about Git in the IBM i community since it was first revealed to be coming to the platform with the launch
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Using Lateral Correlation To Define Expressions In DB2 For i
August 2, 2016 Michael Sansoterra
The SQL implementation in DB2 for i is second to none. However, one irritating thing common to various SQL dialects is the need to repeat expressions in query. As SQL matured over the years, techniques such as nested table and common table expressions became available to, among other things, reduce repetitive expressions. This tip illustrates the use of the LATERAL correlation as another way to avoid repetition.
The Problem
Say you’re writing a report for a grocery wholesaler, where markup on food items is small and discounts are even smaller. Looking for orders that were not priced correctly, you’re tasked
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Townsend Ponders Future Of DB2 Modernization Tech
July 25, 2016 Alex Woodie
What will Townsend Security do with the potentially groundbreaking technology it created to solve a thorny encryption issue in DB2 for i? While the Olympia, Washington-based company is not interested in getting into the database modernization business, it is open to the possibility of licensing its innovative technology–which essentially uses Open Access for RPG to replace record-level I/O calls in legacy RPG apps with the SQL Query Engine–to people who are.
Townsend finds itself in this peculiar situation through no fault of its own. The company ran into a tough technical problem that stymied some of its largest customers in
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IBM Patches 13 Security Vulnerabilities in IBM i JDK
July 20, 2016 Alex Woodie
Time to shore up your Java. Last month IBM patched 13 security vulnerabilities that impact the Java Development Kit (JDK) for IBM i versions 6.1, 7.1, 7.2, and 7.3. The flaws range from being small nuisances to severe, particularly the four flaws that earned perfect 10s on the CVSS impact scale.
Of the 13 vulnerabilities that IBM identified in a June 27 security bulletin, all but three of them were first disclosed to the world by Oracle, which directs development of the semi open-source language and patched the problems. Big Red disclosed the existence of most of the
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Modernization Prioritization Based On Observation
June 6, 2016 Dan Burger
Amidst all the chatter in the IBM midrange community, nothing rises above the catch-all category of modernization. Just about anything that’s done to the system, including brushing the dust off an old AS/400, seems to qualify as modernization. But, after separating the wheat from the chaff, there is real modernization being done and with it comes the realization that the IBM i is as modern as you allow it to be.
After years of Earl Scheib paint jobs–We’ll paint your car for $99–modernization efforts have become better planned, better executed, and better suited for a future that extends
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Watch Your Data While Stepping Out With RDi Debug
May 31, 2016 Susan Gantner
In this latest in my series of tips on using the RDi debugger, I’ll talk about one of my favorite debug features–the Monitors view–and we’ll explore not just one or two, but four different options for stepping through program code a statement at a time.
Stepping Out
Just like with the green screen debugger, you can step through code a statement at a time. Figure 1 shows the various debug tool bar icons with those related to stepping through your code highlighted. The most commonly used options are the two arrows in the middle: “Step Into (F5)” and “Step Over
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LAG And LEAD Functions In DB2 for i 7.3
May 31, 2016 Michael Sansoterra
Database devs, you can kiss many of your cursors goodbye, because DB2 for i has two sweet new functions named LAG and LEAD that will allow you to extract a column value from a different row within the result set (relative to the current row) without programmatically looping through each row.
From the current row, LAG instructs DB2 to look backward in the result set a specified number of rows and retrieve a value. LEAD allows DB2 to look ahead to a specified row beyond the current row and extract a value. In DB2 parlance, these new functions belong to
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Rocket Brings Mobile App DevOps Into The IBM i Fold
May 18, 2016 Alex Woodie
Rocket Software is launching a new tool that simplifies the management and distribution of mobile application source code. Called Rocket Lifecycle for Mobile, the new software is designed to make it easier for IBM i shops to manage the DevOps lifecycle for today’s modern applications, which involve not only closely administered servers but also widely dispersed smartphones.
Mobile application development continues to be a hot trend in the IBM i space, as smartphones become more woven into our personal and professional lives. Four out of 10 IBM i shops have a mobile computing initiative, according to HelpSystems‘ 2016 IBM
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Why Node.js?
May 3, 2016 Aaron Bartell
In case you haven’t noticed, IBM’er Tim Rowe and his team have been delivering a tremendous amount of open source the past few years–sometimes through vendor relationships and sometimes directly from IBM. While frequency has increased as of late, open source has actually been a mainstay on IBM i and its predecessors for a very long time. It started with the Apache web server, then Java, then PHP and MySQL, Ruby, Node.js, Python, and even more you haven’t even heard of. Open source (in particular Node.js) will be the topic of this article. But first, let me give you some
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Refacing Your Database, Part 3
May 3, 2016 Paul Tuohy
In the preceding two articles, we saw how to extract, analyze and correct table and column definitions. In this, the final article on refacing your database, we look at some more options for re-representing data and, finally, generating a script to create the required views.
Handling Numeric Date Fields
One of the issues we need to handle is the representation of dates in the SASALHST table. Figure 1 shows how the purchase date is stored as a numeric field, the order date is stored as a year, month and day and the delivery date is stored as a century, year,