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AquaFold Makes It Easier to Reverse Engineer and Migrate Databases
October 20, 2009 Alex Woodie
People normally take the term “database replication” to mean that data is being replicated from one database to another. But as the result of new entity relationship modeling and reverse engineering capabilities that AquaFold recently rolled out with Aqua Data Studio version 8.0, database replication can also mean replicating the entire structure of one’s database to another database management systems, which the company says will make it easier than ever for users to migrate from, say, Oracle or SQL Server to DB2/400 or MySQL.
Aqua Data Studio is a $399 utility that allows developers, administrators, and analysts to visualize, maintain,
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Much Ado About IBM’s Mainframe Monopoly; Once Again, the i Is Overlooked
October 12, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The business and trade press was all beside itself late last week as it came to light that the U.S. Department of Justice had opened up an investigation of IBM‘s monopolistic practices with regard to the mainframe market. While it is always a welcome sight to see the DoJ at least interested in making sure monopoly power is not abused, it is a little late for someone interested in fostering an alternative mainframe market. (Well, maybe.) And as usual, no one is thinking about the even tighter grip that Big Blue has on an even larger–and more economically powerless–group
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Moore’s Law and the Performance Wall
October 5, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Moore’s Law, one of the most famous observations in the IT industry, could soon be running out of gas. Some might even argue that for certain applications, the ability to cram twice as many transistors onto a piece of silicon every two years or so thanks to the drumbeat progress of semiconductor manufacturing technology advances (and observation made by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in 1965) has already hit a wall. For the Power Systems server running the current i 6.1 or the future i 7.1, the headlights out in front of us may be already showing the brick barrier we
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The Cost of Not Backing Up
September 23, 2009 Hey, Joe
I’m performing a disaster recovery review for a client. The client backs up only i5/OS user libraries daily. He doesn’t back up program libraries, QUSRSYS, QGPL, or QSYS2. He doesn’t process the SAVSECDTA, SAVCFG, SAVDLO, or SAV commands daily or weekly, either. He’s adamant that he has enough libraries to perform a successful system recovery. And it gets worse. . . .
The user only does a complete system save if he loads cumulative PTFs or does a hardware upgrade. He didn’t perform a complete system save before the last hardware upgrade, and he used an old tape to perform
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The Feeds and Guessed Speeds of Power7
September 14, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Just before The Four Hundred went on hiatus, I told you that IBM would be making a presentation about the forthcoming Power7 processors at the Hot Chips 21 conference hosted by the IEEE at Stanford University. And indeed, the top techies working on the eight-core Power7 processors did raise the curtains a little bit about the future brains of the Power Systems lineup, which are due in 2010.
IBM confirmed to me a little more than a year ago that the Power7 chips would have at least eight cores and would be made using a 45 nanometer process in Big
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Reader Feedback on RPG: A Great Language with a Greater History
August 24, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Whenever you bring up the topic of the RPG programming language to the AS/400 community, it gets their attention, and Brian Kelly’s walk down memory lane for RPG in last week’s issue of The Four Hundred predictably resonated with readers. Here’s some of the feedback that readers sent to Kelly, offering advice to IBM and commiserating with the frustration that RPG programmers sometimes feel in a corporate computing landscape dominated by Java, C#, PHP, and other languages.
Hi, Brian:
Thanks for your great RPG article today.
I did code in Fargo and the 1401 RPG, and I have a copy
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The Case of the Missing .NET Data Provider for i5/OS in Visual Studio 2008
July 15, 2009 Michael Sansoterra
Note: The code accompanying this article is available for download here.
Like most people, I hate purchasing something only to find out a piece is missing. If you’ve been merrily rolling along with Visual Studio (VS) 2005 and recently upgraded to 2008, or if you’ve started tinkering with some .NET tutorials with VS 2008, you may have noticed something odd. There’s a piece missing! The .NET Data Provider for i5/OS that comes with V6R1 System i Access does not appear as an option in the Visual Studio 2008 data source configuration wizard. (This tip only applies to the V6R1
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What We Can Learn from iManifest
June 29, 2009 Gordon Davies
There is a lot we can learn here in the States from Japan’s IBM i partner community. A group of over 70 IBM partners and independent software vendors (ISVs) has joined forces there, the world’s second largest information technology market, to launch the IBM i Manifest initiative for the Japanese market.
The partner community project has three main objectives:
- To revitalize the IBM i market in Japan, and increase the customer installed base
- To assure IBM i customer organizations, resellers, and ISVs selling IBM i solutions that IBM i will not only survive, but more importantly continue to prosper
- To
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PHP Application Vendors Gearing Up for Smart Cube Appliances
June 29, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan
As The Four Hundred reported a month ago when the Smart Cube i and Linux appliance servers and their related Smart Market were launched in the United States, Zend Technologies Zend Core PHP engine is bundled on these boxes so ISVs can deploy PHP-based applications on the i or Linux boxes or front ends for RPG applications that are redone in PHP on the i versions of the machine.
The question now is this: Are the PHP application vendors going to jump through the hoops and get their applications certified to play nice with the automation embodied in the Smart
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Magic Delivers Stronger .NET Client with uniPaaS 1.8
June 23, 2009 Alex Woodie
Magic Software yesterday launched uniPaaS version 1.8, a new edition of its framework for developing and running rich Internet applications that live in the cloud, in the customer’s data center, or a combination of the two. With this release, the Irvine, California, software company is offering new integration points with Microsoft .NET, which Magic says will enrich the user experience, particularly for Windows Mobile apps.
First unveiled in early 2008 as G5, uniPaaS is Magic’s new flagship platform for rich Internet applications and the software as a service (SaaS) delivery mechanism. It borrows heavily from the rapid application development expertise