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Global Financing Offers Power5/5+ Takeouts to Power6/6+ Buyers
March 7, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Does IBM want to sell you a shiny new Power7 to replace your old Power5 or Power5+ server and get you to move up to IBM i 7.1, or does it want to sell you a Power6 or Power6+ box instead because these machines support i5/OS V5R4? The answer, as it turns out, is exactly what you would expect from Big Blue or any other IT supplier. IBM wants to sell you whatever you will pay to buy for whatever reason you think you have.
As The Four Hundred has been reporting for the past several weeks, IBM is offering
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SAP to Contest $1.3 Billion TomorrowNow Award to Oracle
February 7, 2011 Timothy Prickett Morgan
It looks like German software giant SAP is not quite ready to hand over the $1.3 billion in damages that a California jury awarded rival Oracle in the TomorrowNow lawsuit.
On February 3, SAP filed a motion with the court contesting the amount of the damages awarded to Oracle, which was the same day that the court entered the judgment awarded by the jury last November 23.
“Today the Court entered judgment in the Oracle v. SAP/TomorrowNow litigation, which is a procedural matter that occurs after a jury verdict,” SAP explained in a statement. “As stated before, we have
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A Reusable Routine for Doubly-Linked Lists, Part 2
January 26, 2011 Miguel Ortiz Martín and Ted Holt
Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here.
In Part 1 of this series, we introduced several concepts, such as managing external storage and defining comparator procedures, that are required for defining a reusable routine for managing doubly-linked lists.
In this second part, we:
- Detail the procedures that create, delete, and manipulate reusable doubly-linked lists.
- Tell you about the source code and how to create a service program.
- Show you an example of how to use the doubly-linked list service program in your applications.
Creating and Destroying a List
Let’s begin with a list of the
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Don’t Let Users Wreck Their Joins
January 26, 2011 Ted Holt
You’re swamped with work, and here comes Harold in Accounts Receivable yet again for help with some query he threw together that doesn’t work correctly. Harold’s not a bad guy–his wife, his kids, and his dog adore him. He just doesn’t understand computer stuff. Here’s a way you can help him help you.
Harold’s problem is that he doesn’t understand how to join files properly. What you need is a way to store join field information on the system. That is, you need a way to store the fact that file A and file B join over field C and
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ASNA’s Newest RPG to .NET Option Now Available
January 18, 2011 Dan Burger
There’s more than one road to take when going from traditional IBM i green-screen applications to Web-based apps. One of those options is a new product from ASNA, a company with a history of products that favor Microsoft .NET development and presentation tools. ASNA’s newest product is called Wings, and the company announced its general availability last week. Four Hundred Stuff reported on the coming of Wings last October.
Of particular note is that Wings uses IBM‘s Open Access: RPG Edition (OAR), a methodology that allows RPG programs to redirect display file I/O–the traditional 5250 data stream–to ASP.NET
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Large Subprocedure Return Values: V7 Brings Relief
November 17, 2010 Jon Paris
In Subprocedure Return Values–Food for Thought, I discussed the performance implications of returning large variables from subprocedures. With IBM i 7.1, IBM has added new RPG compiler features that improve performance when passing large parameters.
The conclusion of my previous tip was that you should use a conventional parameter–instead of returning a value–when large values such as result sets were involved. The downside of such a change of course is that you lose the ability to know exactly which field was changed by a procedure call. Seeing:
GetCustomers( state: customerList );
in the code just doesn’t make what is
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IBM i Future Reflected in LANSA 2010 iPulse Survey
November 15, 2010 Alex Woodie
Both good and bad signs about the IBM i business emerged from LANSA‘s 2010 iPulse survey, the results of which were released last week. For example, while nearly two-thirds of IBM i professionals say the platform faces a low to non-existent threat of being dumped at their shops, nearly half report their new software budget as being zero, which brings future platform investments into question. The survey also asked the 1,700 participants from 50 countries to name the leading IBM i software vendors across several product categories.
The catchphrase “in these uncertain times” has been used to describe all
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IBM i Gets Pressure from Microsoft’s Small Biz Server 2011
November 8, 2010 Timothy Prickett Morgan
I have said it before, and I will say it again. The basic concepts of the Smart Cube server appliance, launched by Big Blue without much fanfare two years ago based on Power Systems and what is now called the IBM i operating system, are correct. You want to drop an application system into SMB shops that provides an application store like iTunes and that provides a consistent support mechanism, managed by IBM and its software partners together, as well as remote, utility-style computing that integrates into the box. IBM seemed to get it, I think.
As the launch last
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RJS Adopts OAR to Simplify Remote Database Access
November 2, 2010 Alex Woodie
RJS Software Systems last week unveiled a free extension to its RPG2SQL Integrator software that uses the new Rational Open Access: RPG Edition (OAR) technology to connect RPG applications running on IBM i to remote databases. According to RJS, the OAR handler conceals some of the complexity of using RPG2SQL Integrator, and makes it easier for programmers to bring outside databases into the IBM i frame.
RPG2SQL Integrator is an established product that allows IBM i programs to read and write to other databases such as Microsoft‘s SQL Server and Access, Oracle‘s 11g database and MySQL, and
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Microsoft Technologies Gaining Ground in the IBM Midrange
September 27, 2010 Dan Burger
The battle of the midrange continues. And Microsoft continues to put the heat on IBM. We know it best as a struggle for IBM i shops to remain i-centric when it comes to their mission critical applications as Microsoft technologies gain stronger footholds in enterprises. Last week I talked with Dee Hester, who heads up platform migration sales in North America and Latin America for Microsoft. Here’s the view from where he sits.
Hester works for Microsoft’s Enterprise Partner Group (EPG), which has a goal of accelerating the adoption of Microsoft technologies at the enterprise level and supporting business