IBM Systems Magazine Blogs

With this post, I continue my exploration of IBM Z and its powerful support for some of the most important software for application development. 

There has been a lot of conversation about the value of pervasive encryption on the IBM Z platform, but it's important broaden the scope and consider the ramifications of data beyond the boundaries of the IBM Z platform itself.

On the road again. Nothing surprising about that because I travel internationally two or more times a month. What is unusual is that this year about half of my trips are security related (the other main topic is performance although I prefer the term resource optimization).

At the beginning of 2018, I stood in front of the IBM i Large User Group and made a not-so-bold promise: it’s going to be a breakthrough year for open source on this platform! Not surprisingly, my prediction held true. For today’s brief blog post, I wanted to list (in no particular order) 10 of the many amazing things that happened in 2018. 

An early iCan blog, written by Scott Forstie in October 2009, reviewed Client Special Registers.  I’m revisiting this topic since client special registers are very useful for understanding who requested work for the database server jobs (QZDASOINIT, QSQSRVR, and QRWTSRVR).

We mentioned in our second article on DATA-INTO that " ... we look forward to seeing what third parties and open-source groups can do with it." Well soon after that piece was published we received good news and bad news. The good news was that Scott Klement had added a DATA-INTO JSON parser to his port of YAJL. That’s also the bad news: Now Jon has to come up with a new project as that was number one on his to-do list!

In the past few months, my team has been receiving many questions about Java, and especially about the support of Java, because of announcements Oracle has made about changes to how they will be supporting their versions of Java 8. We’ve had enough questions that we thought we ought to just publish something that clarifies what IBM i clients need to know about Java and its support options.

After 28 years of working with IBM Db2 for z, and almost 11 years writing the DB2utor blog for IBM Systems Magazine, I’m saying goodbye.

IBM Support has system software maps for AIX, IBM i, VIO server, SUSE, Red Hat and Ubuntu Linux. The maps allow you to quickly locate all the IBM Power Systems server models that support these operating systems. This week's blog provides more information about software maps.