• These POWERUp Sessions Are About the Recent IBM i Announcement

  May 15, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Disneyland didn’t complete construction of Star Wars Galaxy’s Edge in time for next week’s POWERUp conference. But luckily for you, IBM did finalize its IBM i announcement soon enough for COMMON’s annual extravaganza, making next week’s show in Anaheim, California, a great chance for you to learn about the new releases of the operating system, including IBM i 7.4 and 7.3 TR6.

  According to COMMON’s online session guide, there are at least 16 sessions at POWERUp 19 having to do with IBM i 7.4, IBM i 7.3 Technology Refresh 6 (TR6), or the new software that will arrive with …

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• IBM Bolsters ACS with Database and Administrative Goodies

  May 15, 2019 Alex Woodie

  Amid the many enhancements that IBM has delivered with IBM i 7.4 and IBM i 7.3 TR6 is a new release of Access Client Solutions (ACS), which has become the go-to client interface that many IBM i professionals use to access the system for a variety of tasks. Database engineers and system administrators are the big winners with this release.

  There’s no denying that IBM delivered a whopper of release with IBM i 7.4 and its sidekick, IBM i 7.3 TR6. There’s been so much news – starting with the availability and security enhancements in Db2 Mirror and Authority Collection …

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• Guru: Emulate Control Break Reporting With DB2 For i SQL

  May 13, 2019 Michael Sansoterra

  When generating ad hoc user reports, it’s often the case that developers don’t have the time or luxury to write a high-level language program or to use a reporting tool such as DB2 Web Query or Crystal Reports to format the data appropriately. But when a user is given a raw dump of a SELECT statement’s result set in Excel, it can be quite ugly to wade through and format.

  The user may have to do things like add total rows or remove duplicate values, which can be quite time consuming. Thankfully, DB2 for i SQL offers a way to …

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• Does Db2 Mirror Kill The Market for Third Party HA?

  May 6, 2019 Alex Woodie

  IBM launched Db2 Mirror for i two weeks ago to great acclaim, as the clustering technology puts IBM i on par with how most other major systems provide continuous availability. But will Db2 Mirror destroy the platform’s heritage of high availability solutions? IT Jungle asked IBM and the biggest providers of logical replication solutions, and the answer is no. Here’s why.

  The first thing to understand about Db2 Mirror is that, at heart, it’s a database clustering technology. IBM figured out a way to make a single instance of Db2 for i run on two separate systems, in an active-active …

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• R Comes To i

  May 1, 2019 Alex Woodie

  IBM is now officially supporting the language R with its IBM i operating system, the company announced last week. The open source language, which has long been a favorite of data scientists, statisticians, and others involved with scientific computing, gives IBM i an immediate boost when it comes to data mining and machine learning.

  The R language was originally developed 25 years ago by a pair of computer science professors, Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman, at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. The software, which was developed largely in C and Fortran, was based largely on S, a programming language …

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• IBM Brings Active-Active Mirroring Into Db2 For i Database

  April 24, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  As a platform that is approaching 40 years of deployment within enterprises that can’t afford downtime with their mission critical systems – that’s counting the System/38 as well as the AS/400 and its follow-ons as part of the same continuum – it is no surprise at all that IBM midrange systems running RPG and COBOL had some of the most sophisticated – and perhaps the only application-centric – clustering software ever developed.

  Concurrent with the launch of IBM i 7.4 this week, Big Blue is rolling out a new kind of database clustering, which is called Db2 Mirror, that is …

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• Let’s Try Converged Power Infrastructure One More Time

  April 8, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  Do you remember the Flex System modular servers launched seven years ago this month? These were the innovative machines that Big Blue sold off to Lenovo about two and a half years after they were launched and they were ramping? Do you remember the PurePower follow-ons to these that came out in May 2015? Or did we all just imagine that happened?

  These modular machines, which were somewhere halfway between a rack server and a blade server, were put into preconfigured stacks and as the PureFlex system had cloud automation software to create a private cloud and then had …

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• Attention Synon Users: You Can Automate Your Move To RPG Free Form And DevOps

  April 3, 2019 Philippe Magne

  Depending on who you ask, there are about 1,000 IBM i shops that used the CA 2E (Synon) CASE tool to create their applications and are still using this tool to maintain those applications. This is not an easy task any more, and there is a much better way.

  After three years in development and very stringent testing with five early adopter Synon shops, ARCAD Software is rolling out what it calls Modernization as a Service, or MaaS for short, which seeks to completely automate the move from Synon generated code to modern RPG Free Form, SQL, and a complete …

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• Guru: Change XML Elements in SQL

  February 18, 2019 Paul Tuohy

  Over the last few years, it has become more common to store XML or JSON in a column in a table. Whereas SQL provides all the necessary functions to construct/deconstruct XML or JSON from/to relational data, it does not provide an easy means to change the contents of an element. In this article, I am going to demonstrate a technique for changing the contents of an XML element using an SQL stored procedure.

  Just to provide some background, I was recently working on a project where DB2 XML Extender functionality was being replaced with the standard XML functions. The project …

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• LANSA Bought By Software Conglomerate Idera

  January 7, 2019 Alex Woodie

  LANSA, one of the oldest independent software vendors targeting the IBM midrange server and arguably one of the most successful, has been acquired by Idera, a growing conglomerate of software companies that also owns Sencha, and which is owned in part by the same private equity firm behind HelpSystems.

  LANSA was founded in 1987 by Australian businessmen Peter Draney and Lyndsey Cattermole to create and sell software development tools for the IBM System/38. When IBM launched the AS/400 a year later, LANSA supported it with its fourth generation language (4GL) development environment. It hasn’t looked back, and today the company, …

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