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This week I am helping a client migrate their trusty old AS/400 to a shiny brand-new Power System in the Cloud – disclaimer “they call it an AS400, not me” 😉 This glorious old machine has been quietly running IBM-i V7R1, unattended in the corner of a darkened office for a decade. The system admin …
VPN, in plain English A VPN is a private tunnel across the public internet. Think of the internet as a busy high street. Without a VPN, your staff walk that street carrying the company keys. Anyone standing nearby can watch. With a VPN they go through a locked corridor. Same destination. Far fewer strangers. That …
I am in the middle of helping a client lift a physical Power System out of the computer room and onto a cloud IBM i partition. Same workloads. Same legacy ERP system (RPG, CL and AS400 style physical files) that have paid the bills for years. The transition should be seamless to the end users. …
From AS/400 Fossils to Modern IBM i SQL: The Practical Path That Doesn’t Break Everything I’ve just knocked out a short series of practical lessons on dragging classic AS/400 databases into the 21st century with proper IBM i SQL [more] We’re taking those ancient DDS Physical Files and Logical Files and turning them into grown-up …
There is a special breed of IBM i programmer who will fight you to the death over the name of the box. Call it an IBM i Power system and watch their blood pressure climb. Mention Power Systems running IBM i and they start twitching. No, they insist, it is still an AS/400, always has …
As I like to tell IBM i clients: the goal isn’t to get rid of the AS/400 database. It’s to discover that you’ve actually been running one of the world’s best SQL databases all along. The Advantages of Modernizing an Old AS/400 Database to Modern SQL If you are still rocking physical files defined in …
Code Modernization, Upgrading, Refactoring with an AI Coding Companion – Which to use? I have been playing with a little experiment this week and I thought I would share the results while they are still fresh. The star of the show is a classic little RPGLE subfile program I wrote years ago, it’s languished in …
Mapepire on My IBM i System: Finally Database Connections That Dont Make Me Want to Scream into the Void! Picture this: you are building a slick modern app and you just want it to chat nicely with Db2 for i without wrestling ancient ODBC drivers or wrestling with client libraries that feel older than your …
Perhaps the question is really “Is using AI to write code, or at least using AI as a coding assistant, the Future of IBM i Development?“ Well, I reckon AI is absolutely going to be a big part of the future for IBM i development, but it‘s not (yet) able to wave a magic wand …
“This week I’ve been mostly writing sub-procedures” If you have spent any time writing modern RPGLE on IBM i, you’ve seen small sub-procedures, bloated sub-procedures, simple, complex and plain crazy sub-procedures. Over the last week, I’ve been working hard to modernize a whole bunch of legacy RPG and SQL RPG code into cohesive, reusable sub-procedures …
If you have ever stared at a dusty fixed-format RPG III program from the 1990s and thought “there has to be a better way”, then IBM’s latest AI-powered sidekick might just be your new best friend. Meet IBM BOB (yes, that’s the official name now – Project Bob has grown up). BOB is IBM’s AI-first …
One of the most common headaches when you integrate your IBM i with the outside world is converting data between EBCDIC and ASCII. You get a flat file from a PC, pull JSON from a web service, or process input from another platform and suddenly your strings look like garbage. The good news is that …
