Announcing IBM i 7.5 TR3 and 7.4 TR9
Believe it or not, fall is here, which means it’s time for another IBM i announcement. The team has once again spent the summer traveling around the world listening to user feedback from our community and IBM i Advisory Councils and have delivered several key enhancements to our platform and Licensed Program Products (LPPs) that I’m excited to share with you in this blog post.
For all the detailed information on everything included in the TRs, please see the support pages:
As usual with my announcement blogs, I can’t cover everything included in this Technology Refresh, but will pick a few highlights that will be of interest to a variety of our users. Since the “i” in “IBM i” stands for “integration,” and the database is a key component of that, we will start there:
Database
Many new additions to SYSTOOLS have been added for easier automation. Based on the description of our advisors, a 10%-15% productivity boost for system administrators is not out of the question. Db2 for i Services can now capture deep details for SQL statements in plan cache. SQL commands have been extended beyond the database and now includes procedures and functions. Support for many new REST capabilities and new IBM i Services for exploring journals and system values have also been added in this Technology Refresh. As a platform that focuses on transactional data and using the power of a fully relational database on a single-level store architecture, we want to make sure that every use of our integrated data is easy, useful and powerful.
HA/DR
For Db2 Mirror, our continuous availability solution for IBM i, we’ve improved the Health Center GUI which allows for easier gathering of information for mirrored database environments. In PowerHA for i, user defined tracking and resubmission of jobs active at the time of a failure has been simplified, and system administrators now have enhanced visibility to the status of a job at the time of a failure. And to help the performance of save and restore to tape, software data compression now includes support for most existing Save and Restore commands and APIs that support save file and optical compression today. All existing software compression options (such as *LOW, *MEDIUM, *HIGH and *ZLIB) are supported. The ZLIB algorithm automatically uses the on-chip Nest Accelerator (NX) GZIP when the function runs in Power10 compatibility mode on a Power10 processor and is therefore faster and less CPU-intensive than the other compression options.
Application Modernization and Open Source
Monitoring for null field values in request and response payloads has been added to the Integrated Web Server (IWS). For programmers that prefer to work with Visual Studio Code, enhancements to the IBM i interfaces have been added and new extensions are available to allow developers to work with Db2 for i right from the IDE. Those of you using Rational Developer for i, new iDoc templates have been added as well.
Navigator for i
Several ease-of-use enhancements have been made to Navigator for i that could easily lead to a 5%-10% productivity improvement for system administrators:
• Table filter improvements across much of the product
• Directly edit the DNS configuration root servers
• Improvements to the UI, specifically for IFS views
• Remote print queues added to printing support
• Enhancements to work management capabilities
• Security views and capabilities expanded
I’ve outlined above at a high level just a few of the highlights of this Technology Refresh. For more details, register for the COMMON webcast today, October 10, at 10 a.m. CST, where the IBM i Business Architects will discuss the updates related to each of their areas. Also, IBM Db2 for i Business Architect Scott Forstie will be hosting an additional webcast with COMMON this Thursday, October 12, at 10 a.m. CST, where he will go more into detail on the new SYSTOOLS functions within Db2 for i. Register for that webcast here.