THE FOUR HUNDRED - Power Systems & IBM i Insights

1. Oracle Dips A Toe Into IBM’s EBCDIC World

   IBM’s Ted Codd may have invented the relational database back at the Almaden Lab in the early 1970s, but it was Larry Ellison’s Oracle that offered the world the first wildly commercially successful RDBMs. Technically, the System/38 was announced, with its integrated relational database, before the first version of Oracle was announced.

   Since then, Oracle and IBM have competed intensely to win and run transactional database workloads for some of the biggest enterprises around. But there was always one key difference between the two companies’ offerings: Oracle used an ASCI character set while the IBM midrange and mainframe systems relied …

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2. When Your Small IBM i Team Is Really A Team Of One

   IBM i has long been associated with efficiency. Its reliability, integrated architecture, and low administrative overhead have enabled organizations to run critical business applications with relatively small teams. That same efficiency has created an emerging risk: in many smaller shops, operational resilience depends less on the platform itself and more on whether enough people know how to support it under pressure.

   While some IBM i shops run with a lean team of two, three, or a small handful of staff, it is not unusual for one person to be responsible for the most critical aspects of the operation. The risk …

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3. Guru: Putting Failure Handling In Its Place

   One of the things I enjoy most about procedure-driven RPG is that it encourages us to think about responsibility. Every procedure should have a clear purpose. It should perform one task well and leave unrelated concerns to other parts of the application.

   That sounds straightforward enough, yet one responsibility often finds its way into nearly every procedure we write: failure handling.

   If you have worked with RPG for any length of time, you have probably encountered applications where nearly every procedure begins with a MONITOR operation. The procedure performs its work, catches any exception that occurs, logs an error, returns …

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4. Inside The Security Enhancements In ACS

   Keeping track of IBM i configurations and how users are using IBM i is important for security purposes. But administrators and analysts are already so overburdened with other responsibilities that it is easy to let something slip by. That is why IBM is building new SQL capabilities into Access Client Solutions, which hopefully will make it easier for IBM i shops to spot potentially damaging configs or uses before they hurt the organization.

   ACS is one of the most important tools provided by IBM for IBM i professionals, as it contains a slew of facilities for interacting with the system. …

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5. IBM i PTF Guide, Volume 28, Number 28: A Crazy Number of Security Vulnerability Patches

   It looks like 28 is not your lucky number if you are an IBM i shop. The reason why is that in Volume 28 and Number 28 of the IBM i PTF Guide, Big Blue has released a truly amazing number of security vulnerabilities and patches for the IBM i platform. We counted 40 security vulnerabilities, some of which are still awaiting patches, plus 22 High Impact/Pervasive (HIPER) patches for firmware on Power9, Power10, and Power11 systems. But a few items before we dive into that.

   First: The System Planning Tool, version 6.26.223.0, is now available for download at …

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