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Software Vendors Prep For IBM i 7.3, Applaud PDP for Testing
April 25, 2016 Alex Woodie
It’s been only 10 days since IBM i 7.3 became generally available, and customers are just starting to play around with it. While we don’t expect many 7.3 environments to go into production right away, a surprising number of software vendors already support it. And you might be interested in learning about the innovative new way that IBM is helping vendors get current on new releases, namely the Power Development Cloud (PDP).
There’s a lot of good stuff in IBM i 7.3, which IBM announced on April 12 and shipped three days later. In addition to the neat new analytic
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Surge of Services in DB2 for i, Part 2
April 19, 2016 Michael Sansoterra
Continuing where we left off in Part 1, a slew of new IBM i services (and enhancements to existing services) were released in IBM i 7.2 TR3 and IBM i 7.1 TR11. This article continues to detail some of the important new services.
As always, keep in mind that just an overview is given here and that the developerWorks documentation or IBM i Services in the Knowledge Center should be consulted in order to understand the full capability of each service.
This view runs a real-time query against the IBM Preventative Service Planning (PSP) website and can indicate
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A Peek At Upcoming Open Source Enhancements In IBM i
March 28, 2016 Alex Woodie
Over the past 15 years, the open source community has driven a massive amount of innovation in IT. It has gotten to the point where IBM and Microsoft–two bastions of proprietary development–are now champions of open source. The open source wave is not quite as strong on the IBM i platform, but it appears that wave will gain momentum with the upcoming new release of the OS.
It’s hard to quantify the value created through open source development of software. Last year, the Linux Foundation released a white paper that found the total value of the development of the
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Slash Job Scheduler Setup Work by Half, ASCI Says
March 16, 2016 Alex Woodie
A new release of the ActiveBatch job scheduler from Advanced Systems Concepts contains new features that reduces the amount of job setup work by 50 percent, the company claims. The New Jersey software company, which supports the IBM i server with its job scheduler, also unveiled the results of a survey that demonstrates the importance of job scheduling to cloud, big data, and virtualization initiatives.
Among the enhancements in ActiveBatch version 10, which ASCI announced nine months ago and shipped in February, are a job library that contains hundreds of “production-ready” job templates that the company says enables developers to
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No More Java 6 Support in Next Version of IBM i
March 9, 2016 Alex Woodie
We don’t know much about the next release of the IBM i operating system, except that it will (probably, maybe) be called version 7.3 and that it will have awesome new features, according to those who have been briefed under non-disclosure agreements. But IBM has already made one thing certain about the new OS: It won’t run Java 6. As IBM i product manager Steve Will explains, it’s time for Java developers to move on.
IBM updated its Java on IBM i developerWorks webpage on February 17 to reflect the fact that IBM i 7.2 will be the last release
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PHP Crash Course For RPG Developers
February 23, 2016 Chris Ringer
Suppose your boss tasks you with grabbing and processing some XML from an HTTP request to create a new customer order. If you have a “deer in the headlights” expression on your face, don’t fear, you don’t have to punt this request over the cubicle wall to the web developers. Without weeks or months of training, you can build a PHP script to retrieve the XML data that RPG can parse.
What is PHP?
PHP is a full-featured scripting language that runs on a web server. Just type your PHP code in a text editor (even Notepad), save it on
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Parsing Delimited Text Data Natively In SQL, Part 2: Java To The Rescue
February 9, 2016 Michael Sansoterra
Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here.
In Part 1 of this series, I introduced ParseFileContent, a 100 percent SQL user-defined table function (UDTF) that can parse delimited text (as a CLOB or IFS file) and format the results as rows and columns. As an advantage over tools like CPYFRMIMPF, this UDTF can streamline a text based import process by allowing CASTs, JOINs, and data integrity checks to be done while the import is running. As useful as ParseFileContent is, it does suffer a few drawbacks.
ParseFileContent is not particularly fast and it can’t handle
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IBM Patches OpenSSH Security Flaws That Impact IBM i
February 8, 2016 Alex Woodie
IBM last week patched another pair of security vulnerabilities in the OpenSSH client for IBM i. The security flaws, which impact all current releases of IBM i–and very likely older releases that are no longer under maintenance–carry a moderate to severe risk, and could be used to execute arbitrary code on an IBM i server, obtain private cryptographic security keys, or execute a denial of service attack, IBM says.
On February 1, IBM issued a security bulletin to address the two flaws in its OpenSSH implementation for IBM i. Both flaws stem from a poor design in the OpenSSH client
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Parsing Delimited Text Data Natively in SQL, Part 1
January 26, 2016 Michael Sansoterra
Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here.
A common task for database developers is to accept a delimited text file, parse it, and dump it into a database table. This tip demonstrates a user-defined table function (UDTF) that can accomplish this task based on delimited text data stored in a CLOB or in an IFS file.
The UDTF is called ParseFileContent and it accepts three parameters: CLOB data to parse, row delimiter character(s), and column delimiter character(s). The UDTF returns a ROWID column that represents the line number of the text data and 250 columns
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2016 Predictions for IBM i: Round Two
January 18, 2016 Alex Woodie
Last week, we ran our first roundup of 2016 predictions from various CEOs and other prominent members of the IBM i community (see “2016 Predictions For IBM i: Cautious Optimism”). As promised, here we go for a second round, which continues the optimistic note, for both the platform and the community as a whole.
Jim Oberholtzer, CEO at Agile Technology Architects
“I think the biggest play for IBM in the new year will be the open source movement on Power, and specifically on IBM i. IBM has been laying the groundwork for a major push in those technologies