Category: IBM i
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Corporate Inertia
Resistance. Inertia. It’s hard to understand why people don’t do what they know they should be doing. This inertia isn’t just for people who really need to go to the gym or stop losing hours on Facebook. There’s also such a thing as Corporate Inertia. When you’re introducing some IT solution which will address a…
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RPG 2017 Updates
During the latest round of IBM i Technology Refreshes, TR2 for version 7.3 and TR6 for version 7.2 enhancement, IBM also introduced three enrichments for RPG. These changes will be released as individual PTFs, around the April 2017 timespan, as with the Technology Refreshes. Let us take a look at these. These are: Nested data-structures…
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IBM i Daylight Saving Time Management
Spring is on its way (Halleluiah!) and next month the clocks with be springing forward an hour. As a boy (and the youngest of my clan) I remember it was always a job given to me to go around the house and change the dozen or so clocks that we had around the place. Nowadays…
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Application Runtime Expert – Worth a Look?
IBM recently announced that their product, Application Runtime Expert (ARE) for IBM I, is now free of charge, along with a host of other products. The IBM announcement can be found here if you are interested. ARE is a licensed program, 5733ARE, which will work on any IBM i Version 6 or above. It was…
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Deleting Old Spool Files – DLTOLDSPLF
OK, so nobody likes tidying up, not at home, not in the office and certainly not on their computers. How many spool files are there sitting on your system right now that deserve a “Long Service Award” because of the amount of time they’ve been in your company? It’s a pain I know, removing spool…
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RPG – What’s New in 7.3
As you probably know, IBM released 7.3 of the IBM i operating system in April 2016. So now it has been over six months since the new release, let us take a look at what has changed in RPG for this release. Remember that SEU has not been updated since Version 6.1 way back…
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Running an Old AIX Version?
At an IBM event recently, the presenter asked for a show of hands of companies that are still running AIX 6.1. Quite a few, even though the last service pack for AIX 6.1 is scheduled for April 2017 … not too far off. Then the presenter asked about AIX 5.3. It was a shock…
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Detecting Damaged Objects
With IBM i being as robust as it is, for most of us damaged objects are a rare thing but the problem is that they tend to turn up at the most inopportune moments. So, in this article I wanted to share a little known tool called areVerify that IBM created to detect damaged objects…
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Git – A Free SCM?
In my previous article I gave you an insight into the new open source editor Orion on the IBM i. If you haven’t yet read my Orion PowerWire article, it can be found here. As promised in that article I said I would now move on to Git, which is closely integrated with Orion, and…
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Orion – An RDi Alternative?
Introduction – Are you not yet using RDi for your RPG development, but are fed up with SEU lagging behind in releases and complaining of syntax errors when using the latest programming features? Then maybe Orion is for you. In this article, I would like to run you through a new addition to IBMs open…
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Reclaim DB Cross-Reference (RCLDBXREF)
As we all know, DB2 for i is pretty darn tough and is rather good at both healing and optimising itself but every now and again you need to give it a little helping hand. One example of this is the need to run a repair command to fix one or more of the Database…
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Time Travelling with DB2 for i – The Follow Up
Introduction In my last article, on Temporal Tables for DB2 for i, which can be found here, I gave a quick insight on how easy it was to create and report on time travelling queries. Since this time, I gave the first workshop on Temporal Tables at the highly successful International i Power 2016 conference…