Latest Articles
Sorting Results by Specific Values in SQL with CASE
Recently I rewrote the backend for my service, Any New Books, due to an Amazon API change. Generally speaking, rewriting an entire codebase is a bad idea. However, the code was quite old and the API changes rather drastic, so I took the opportunity to rewrite the...
4 Tech Innovations That Could Change Smartphones
Smartphones have gotten so advanced today that it can almost be hard to tell the difference between the top options. That’s not to say you’d literally mix up an iPhone and its Samsung counterpart — but there aren’t too many defining features that really set one apart...
DOCKER, Containers and Containerization
With the advent of IBM z/OS Container Extensions (zCX), most of the applications that run on Linux at present will also be able to run on z/OS as Docker containers. zCX will be able to run Linux on Z applications on z/OS. Application developers having no z/OS skills...
Mainframe News Out There
Once a month we like to pick blog articles from other sources that we feel are interesting enough to talk about on the Planet Mainframe blog. Here are this month’s picks: The Mainframe Is a Modern Platform An interesting article by Planet Mainframe friend and IBM Gold...
RPA + Mainframe? Don’t Send Your Technical Debt to Loan Shark Territory
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is among the hottest enterprise technologies today, as it promises simple automation of a wide variety of tasks that humans have heretofore performed in front of computers. RPA is especially useful when the interactions are with older,...
Application Architecture: an Evolutionary View
The Mainframe Era In 1970 I joined a company, Databank Systems Ltd, that operated a national network of 6 computer centres, each containing a S360/40. In total this was less than 1/10,000th of the power of my current laptop, at a cost several thousand times...
New Year, Old Stuff; And New…
What can I say? I'm an old guy and I like old stuff. The best example of this is my 1968 Oldsmobile Cutlass convertible. I bought it about 10 years ago, a little bit before my 50th birthday. I've had older cars before - in my 30's I had a beautiful 1968 Camaro - that...
Fear the Mainframe
For many years, it seems, management and the distributed IT team have, more-or-less, ignored the mainframe. The mainframe has been quietly keeping the company in business, running all those transactions, and being reliable, powerful, scalable, and secure. All the...
The 5 Key Factors for Database Performance
IT organizations are always chasing better performance. This involves monitoring, tuning, and improving all aspects of the IT infrastructure, encompassing servers, networks, applications, desktops, and databases. But let’s focus on the database, shall we? Five factors...
Mainframes, containers, and Linux
We all know why mainframes are good – all that reliability, availability, and security stuff that we’ve been hearing about for many years. The question then becomes: how can we make mainframes better? IBM’s new Z15 mainframe announcement shows how security can be...
