• IBM Adds Support For Publishing JSON In DB2

  October 4, 2017 Alex Woodie

  At long last, IBM i shops will be able to publish JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) documents from their Db2 for i database. That much-desired capability will finally arrive as part of the latest Technology Refreshes (TRs) for IBM i versions 7.2 and 7.3, which were announced yesterday and ship this month. New SQL commands and security log enhancements round out the release.

  The capability to publish JSON documents has been a long time coming for IBM i shops, who until now have had to content themselves with the capability to consume and store JSON within their database, but who lacked …

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• Guru: Consuming A REST Web Service Using SQL And POST

  October 2, 2017 Mike Larsen

  In my prior article, I showed how to consume a REST web service using the GET verb. This time, we’re going to continue to build our knowledge of web services by working with the POST verb. In addition to working with a different verb, I’m also going to demonstrate how to pass a header and body to the service.

  The goal is to post information to an Amazon Web Service (AWS). I created a simple REST Amazon Web Service that accepts information about a pet which will be inserted into a pet store database. I pass a JSON structure …

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• More Database Tools Highlight Latest IBM i Access Client

  September 18, 2017 Dan Burger

  Remember IBM i Access for Windows? Many IBM i advocates do because they never stopped using it, despite its replacement by IBM i Access Client Solutions more than four years ago. Access for Windows hasn’t seen an enhancement since ACS arrived and ACS is on a continual enhancement schedule. The most recent round of upgrades arrived in mid-July without much fanfare, which is the way IBM seems to prefer.

  SQL developers and database engineers (those that have the title and those that only have the responsibility) are among the professionals benefiting the most from the expanding ACS toolset that usually …

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• IBM i’s TCO Advantage Widens, According to Reports

  September 13, 2017 Alex Woodie

  IBM recently published a new report that claims the total cost of ownership (TCO) of an IBM i server over three years is dramatically lower than the equivalent Windows or Linux setups. It’s not the first such study IBM has done over the years, but what’s interesting is the gap appears to have widened considerably compared to a similar study six years ago.

  In the latest TCO study, research and management consulting firm Quark + Lepton measured how much it would take hypothetical businesses to buy and manage three sets of servers: a Power Systems server running IBM i 7.3 …

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• Lack Of Available RPG Skills Not A Hard Problem To Fix

  September 11, 2017 Dan Burger

  Running an IT department can be a grind. The reliability and manageability of your hardware and software certainly influences how hard the grind becomes, but the job becomes so much easier when you have a staff that removes much of your burden. Successfully developing that staff and creating a positive culture while dealing with turnover and “do more with less” imperatives has a huge impact on whether the CIO or IT director manages the grind or gets ground up. And once in a while, a new addition to the staff comes with a surprisingly positive impact. That leads me into …

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• Where’s the ‘Coleman’ for IBM i?

  August 30, 2017 Alex Woodie

  In case you haven’t noticed, we’re in the midst of an artificial intelligence (AI) revolution that’s bringing automation to places where it never existed, including ERP software. The latest entry into the field is Infor, which turned heads last month with a new AI bot dubbed Coleman. Unfortunately – or fortunately, depending on your views on AI – Coleman won’t be coming to IBM i.

  Infor, which owns the biggest collection of IBM i application software on the planet, has slyly positioned itself as a scrappy alternative to Oracle and SAP in the enterprise software space. While the giants …

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• Guru: Conditional SQL Unions

  July 17, 2017 Ted Holt

  SQL unions combine two or more result sets into one. That’s what they were designed to do. But unions also provide a way to choose between alternate result sets, i.e. to enable or disable SELECT statements at run time. I have used this feature to advantage on numerous occasions. Here’s how it’s done.

  First consider the nature of unions. Each result set of a union can return data or no data, depending on the criteria in the WHERE and HAVING clauses. If a SELECT retrieves no data, the system appends an empty set to the union result. The way to …

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• Guru: Retrieving Images From An SQL Table

  July 10, 2017 Mike Larsen

  In the first part of this series, I showed you how to load images from the IFS into a table that has a column defined as a BLOB data type. BLOB stands for Binary Large Object and is a collection of binary data that is stored as a single entity in a database.

  Our final goal is to retrieve the images from the table we loaded in part 1 and write them back to the IFS. Once we complete this task, we should end up with the same five images we worked with in part 1. To keep everything …

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• DB2 For i Support Now Offered by Rimini Street

  June 26, 2017 Alex Woodie

  IBM i shops now have another option for obtaining technical support and maintenance services in support their DB2 for i environment: Rimini Street. And in some cases, owing to the uniquely integrated nature of this platform, the vendor will even provide support for the IBM i operating system as well.

  Earlier this month, the Las Vegas, Nevada, company announced that it’s now offering third-party support services for all three versions of IBM‘s DB2 database – DB2 for i, DB2 for z/OS, and DB2 for Linux, Unix, and Windows (a.k.a. “Cousin LUWy”), in addition to the SQL Server database from …

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• Rocketing Ahead With An API Engine

  June 26, 2017 Timothy Prickett Morgan

  The history of computing is governed by a plethora of opposing forces, with the polar opposites interweaving and interleaving to create more general trends that undulate and cause the waves we ride on top of or get swamped by. There is a tendency toward abstraction and the desire to get closer to the iron to wring the absolute most performance out of a specific system, for instance. Humans don’t think in binary or assembler – well most humans don’t but there are always a few genius weirdos – so the speed of execution is sacrificed for the speed of the …

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