The 5th year of presence at BeNeLux event (including 2 virtual events) !
We have a (physical) Booth … and an Education session :
IBM i improved by the magic SnapShot/FlashCopy
Learn how to use from IBM i the SnapShot/FlashCopy ‘magic’ function and Reduce daily work.
Learn how to configure and to manage (automatically) your IBM i and your external storage to take advantage of the FlashCopy/SnapShot technology. This ‘magic’ function can save plenty of daily work to IBM i users, by transforming many hours operations into a few minutes, e.g. : Pre-prod or UAT environments refresh, easy roll back to a clean Database (or IFS) after incidents (corruption, errors, loss, malware), daily backups (and even Save21) performed in less than 2 minutes. Learning Objectives:
Understand this external storage technology and discover many interests by using it. Learn how to start and use it for and from an IBM i partition, manually or by program. Get the list of elements, tips and gotchas to take care of when cloning a partition.
See you in a while.
M81 is a French Software house, dedicated on IBM i. We developed 3 system products to improve IBM i since 8 years, now installed in more than 200 end-customers worldwide!
“We are leaving the platform, because we cannot find RPG programmers” I am sick and tired of this comment. For me this is pure BS and I will tell you why.
First of all, to be a bit more humble, if you are still running RPGII and RPGIII code from 1970s and 1980s you might be correct (It is awesome you can still run this on completely different and hyper modern hardware architecture that would have blown the programmer away when the code was written). You will even find it impossible to get someone who wants to learn those versions (even if I have a very inspiring example when this happened and they are now using AI in the modernised RPG application). Learn, yes people are still interested in learning things such as MODERN programming languages where Full Free Form RPG is one of them. Remember new programming languages comes out every now and then and people learn how to program in them.
To be successful you therefore need to do your homework and give the developers an environment that is attractive to them. Most likely you have a pretty cool business to support with the application already, IBM i is always involved in business critical stuff after all. Btw, an attractive environment for developers today includes modern IDE’s, open source and modern tooling like Git based stuff. I hope I don’t have to remind you that SQL should be your other No1 programming language. It is time jump off the steam locomotive and jump on the high speed train that is on the same platform.
Learn modern RPG is not difficult for a decent smart person. To learn your or your clients business though is often the tricky part. If you have other developers in house already who knows at least the basics of your “business logic” I would start by reaching out to them. If you hired people with the right attitude and curiosity to begin with they will say H*LL YEAH!
By the way, like Paul Tuohy (the picture is not of his best side should be mentioned) says there are two kinds of programmers. Maintenance programers and business application developers. You should most likely to go for the latter. Well, not if you are still looking for a RPGII person perhaps 🙂
“No schools educate people in RPG”, is another comment I virtually punch people in the face when I hear. One reason is because this is not true, the second reason is I rarely hear companies in the need of programming skills in R, D, Rust, Go or any new programming language crying out the same complaints. Instead they are reaching out to schools and companies learning these languages or just put courses up themselves if they have the resources, like Asseco PST in Portugal or Sanmarco Informatica in Italy.
Therefore I have put together a list of alternatives for you (Thank you Michael Mayer for your list on your great site https://ibmireference.blogspot.com for a number of links) when you are planning for the future of your IBM i application.
IBM Education (still around and updated)
In Europe you have a number of local provides teaching in their native (speaking) language as well.
There are also hundreds of smaller firms helping out if needed.
Earlier this year I wrote about using the QjoRtvJrnReceiverInformation API to get information about journal receivers. I noticed that in a recent batch of PTFs a new SQL View, JOURNAL_RECEIVER_INFO, which provides all of the information I am interested in. It is easier to get the information I desire from the SQL View than the API, so why would I continue to use the API?
The View JOURNAL_RECEIVER_INFO is found in the QSYS2 library. I recommend that you run the following statement to see all of the columns and information it contains:
SELECT * FROM QSYS2.JOURNAL_RECEIVER_INFO LIMIT 10 ; Read more »
