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EnterpriseDB Sets Sights on Oracle’s MySQL
August 22, 2011 Alex Woodie
It’s no secret that EnterpriseDB, the company that sells and supports commercial versions of the open source PostgreSQL database, is going after MySQL. The company, which says revenues are growing at a 2X annual pace, senses that Oracle is ostracizing its MySQL customers and partners–something that IBM i customers can relate to. But while PostgreSQL makes inroads in the X64 and Itanium markets, it’s not clear if the database will find a similar reception in Power Systems.
MySQL is undoubtedly one of the commercial open source success stories of the last decade. The open source RDBMS found a
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ILE: Decisions, Decisions, Part 2
August 10, 2011 Susan Gantner
In an earlier tip, I explored questions I often hear about binding directories. In this tip, I’ll explore another commonly asked ILE question and give you my perspective.
Question: How many service programs should I have and how big should they be?
Answer: It depends.
Don’t you hate that answer? But in this case, I do think it is completely application dependent. Often when I am asked this question, the emphasis seems to be related to performance. But I don’t think the decision on the “what” or “how much” to put into a service program should be made based
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IBM Uncorks RPG Open Access Trial Version
August 8, 2011 Dan Burger
The scarecrow got a brain, the tin man got a heart, the cowardly lion got courage, and the RPG developer community finally got a free trial version of Rational Open Access: RPG Edition. It took a lot of patience and a lot of suggestion box stuffing, but IBM did deliver. Whether this small but significant step will lead to a surge in modern RPG development is yet to be seen. But it is undoubtedly a step in the right direction.
Most importantly, it shows IBM’s support for RPG, one of the few programming languages created by Big Blue for business
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Mad Dog 21/21: Debit And Taxis
August 8, 2011 Hesh Wiener
“You talkin’ to me?” That’s what Travis Bickle, played by Robert De Niro, said, in the 1976 film Taxi Driver, as he practiced drawing his gun. His thin clients included characters played by Jodie Foster and Cybill Shepherd. Today every one of New York’s 13,087 yellow cabs has a thin client that isn’t as pretty as Foster or Shepherd. It is a mobile computer that includes a self-service payment terminal talking to banks in the cloud by cellular radio. Its screen displays videos so awful you wish for Bickle and his gun. And that’s just for starters.
When
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RPG Open Access Suffering from Inaccessibility
July 25, 2011 Dan Burger
You would think that in any IT community, especially one as tight as the IBM i community, there would be few, if any, secrets. But that doesn’t do justice to IBM, where apparently it is believed that loose lips sink ships. A good example is RPG Open Access. Funny how you could have something called Open Access and yet hardly anyone talks about it except the proponents of modern RPG.
Here’s a tool, officially referred to as Rational Open Access: RPG Edition, that had RPG developers overflowing sessions at the COMMON 2010 Conference. It was one of the first
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Still Wanted: A Power-i System of Systems
July 18, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
IBM is all about “smarter systems” and “workload optimized systems” these days in its marketing, and as far as I can tell, in the past two years the company has not done anything to bring the kinds of focused design it has for supercomputing and mainframe shops, just to name two, to bear on the Power Systems/IBM i base. And I think the company is missing a big opportunity to re-engage in a big way with those midrange customers.
What got me to thinking about this, of course, was last week’s launch by Big Blue of the mini mainframe called
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Finding Duplicate Rows in a Name and Address Table
May 25, 2011 Skip Marchesani
Many companies still use the U.S. Postal Service to mail promotional and marketing materials to existing and potential customers. With rising printing expenses and postal rates, it’s important to minimize waste by identifying and eliminating duplicate rows in name and address tables. However, these tables can present some interesting challenges.
For instance, the following two addresses are duplicates, but how do you identify them as potential duplicate rows?
John Sampson
Dickerson Mutual Ins.
218 Bridge St., Suite 257
New York, NY 12345John Samson
Dickerson Insurance
218 Bridge Street
NYC, NY 12345Companies can write their own software, which has
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Admin Alert: Other Options for a Post-Upgrade Backup
May 25, 2011 Joe Hertvik
In an earlier column, I wrote about how administrators can save time after an i operating system upgrade by performing a Save System (SAVSYS) backup instead of a full system save. Several readers wrote in with more information and system information backup tips. Let’s look at what they had to say about post-upgrade backups and what we can learn from them.
A Better Post-Upgrade Backup Strategy
Pete Massiello of iTech Solutions wrote in with the best suggestion for post-upgrade backups when he said:
I perform many upgrades, and I tell my customers that the best option, if time permits,
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IBM i Chief Architect Tells Us Where We’re At
May 23, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
When you are the IBM i chief architect, you are not just the top techie in charge of the platform, but you are also the unofficial and sometimes the official spokesperson for the platform to the outside world. That job was handled by Frank Soltis, the father of the System/38 and the grandfather of the AS/400, for more than three decades. And for the past couple of years, Steve Will has been chief architect and spokesperson, and has lately been making the rounds talking about where the IBM i platform is and where it is going.
Will took the IBM
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Magic Kicks Off Mobile Application Push
May 17, 2011 Alex Woodie
Magic Software is targeting Blackberry and Windows Mobile smartphones with a new initiative to deliver access to enterprise applications from mobile devices, which it announced last week. The company eventually plans to natively support all major mobile platforms with uniPaaS, its flagship rich Internet application (RIA) development and runtime framework that deploys on IBM i servers, among others.
Magic has always touted platform independence as one of the primary differentiators of its application development tools. Its current uniPaaS offering, which uses a model-driven development paradigm, builds on Magic’s 4GL roots, and provides customers with a degree of future-proofing, in terms