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AS/400: Still Kicking After 21 Years
June 22, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan
The AS/400, in its current incarnation as the Power Systems server platform running the i 6.1 operating system and the DB2 for i integrated database, turns 21 this week. I think that means it can finally buy hard liquor and have a stiff drink, which is something that such a venerable platform as the AS/400 certainly deserves. I think it is safe to say that you old timers, the AS/400 faithful who predate whippersnappers like me (with only 20 years in the market) all need a good stiff drink, with the global economy in the state that it is in
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Admin Alert: A Simple Save While Active Backup Program
June 17, 2009 Joe Hertvik
The problem with 24×7 environments is that it’s difficult to make time to run complete system backups. Modern processing needs dictate that you can rarely, if ever, take down your machine to back up the entire system. This week, I’ll look at a hybrid backup scheme that lets you achieve the dual goal of performing occasional full system backups while still saving all your critical system and user data.
A Simple Strategy
The following is a simple save strategy that you may be able to use in your shop. It consists of two system backup elements that allow you to
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Advanced DB2 for i Data Access Techniques with .NET
June 10, 2009 Hey, Mike
There are a lot of shops like mine where one or two people are responsible for everything and we are very busy trying to learn new technologies and push the business forward. My project is very large. It will eventually replace 90 percent of the green-screen menu driven system we currently use. I am working on this project alone and building it slowly from the ground up. I want to have a well-built base. I want to understand how .NET and DB2 work together before I start building a lot on top of the base program. I am working with
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Speedware Joins Microsoft AS/400 Program
May 26, 2009 Alex Woodie
Speedware is the latest ISV to join the Midrange Alliance Program, Microsoft‘s program for consultants and ISVs who are interested in advocating a .NET approach to modernizing OS/400 programs, and migrating them off the platform to Windows.
Speedware is a Montreal, Quebec-based company that has been helping AS/400 shops modernize their applications for the last 10 years. In addition to modernizing their systems, Speedware has developed a collection of tools to help automate the process of migrating AS/400 shops and their RPG code off the proprietary midrange platform entirely. This makes Speedware a good fit for Microsoft’s MAP program,
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ARCAD Moves Open Systems Initiative Forward with Application Lifecycle Management Software
May 12, 2009 Dan Burger
ARCAD Software CEO and Chairman Philippe Magne has been talking for more than a year about the importance of open systems and open software. Although indisputably IBM i oriented, Magne’s business compass is pointing the change management and application lifecycle management software company toward open systems. While the company’s current products require the IBM i to be in the mix, that requirement won’t always be true. The latest round of product enhancements indicates more moves in the open systems direction.
ARCAD’s application lifecycle management software has always been built around a single, central repository that resides on the IBM i.
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Treasury of New DB2 6.1 (V6R1) Features, Part 6: Miscellaneous Enhancements
May 6, 2009 Michael Sansoterra
As the saying goes “all good things must come to an end.” And alas, this is the last in my series of tips on improvements to DB2 for i in V6R1. This final tip will cover the hodgepodge of remaining notable features added since the V5R4 that haven’t been covered in the prior tips. Stick around because there is some good stuff in here.
ALTER FUNCTION Statement
V5R4 gave us the ALTER PROCEDURE statement and now, at long last, DB2 has the ALTER FUNCTION statement. Prior to 6.1, when a function needed a modification, developers were forced to drop and
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Aldon Introduces Version Control to Build and Release Management
May 5, 2009 Dan Burger
People are not robots (tell that to your manager) and application development teams are going to use whatever versioning tool they want. Distributed development environments have made sure of that. It’s a corresponding truth that application build and release processes are bit more complicated, but you’ve probably already noticed that. So have the product designers at Aldon, an application lifecycle management software company with a long history as an IBM i vendor.
Aldon, last week at the COMMON 2009 Annual Meeting and Exposition, introduced the availability of a new Build Release Management (BRM) product that allows development teams using
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The State of PHP on the Power Systems i
April 20, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan
When you follow the IT market for a living, sometimes you get lucky and spot a trend way out in the future and maybe you get to see it come true. Maybe you don’t. I have been, for instance, thinking that something akin to cloud computing (it was called utility computing back then) would be coming along since the dot-com boom started, just because of the economies of scope and scale aggregated computing farms offer and the high-touch, and therefore high-cost, nature of maintaining servers. We’ll see if this comes to pass. But back in early 2005, it didn’t take
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IBM Expands Power Systems-ISV Promotion
April 6, 2009 Timothy Prickett Morgan
Hoping to scare up some business for its Power Systems platform and to get a little help from its independent software vendor partners, IBM last week extended a promotion on Power-based systems that has been running since March 2007 to cover more ISVs and more of their solutions.
Under this Software Solutions for Power Systems Rebate Offering, which was originally aimed at the System p (AIX and Linux) part of the house but which was expanded last September to include the i 6.1 operating system and applications from ISVs who sell i-based software, IBM offers rebates that range from as
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Catching Robot/SCHEDULE Job Failures As They Happen
March 25, 2009 Hey, Joe
We’re using Help/Systems Robot/SCHEDULE version 9.0 to schedule batch jobs on an i5/OS V5R4 machine, and it works great. However, I have a new requirement to alert my staff whenever a Robot job fails to run or terminates unexpectedly. Do you know of any utilities that can monitor and send out email pages when this happens?
–Bob
Given that Robot/SCHEDULE is one of the most widely used utilities in iSeries, System i, and Power i shops, I’ve run into this problem before and wrote a utility to do exactly what you’re talking about. I’ve run this utility on Robot/SCHEDULE version