<story><title>IBM AS/400: Databases all the way down (2019) [video]</title><url>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDSgJE5mPJM</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>rbanffy</author><text>I like to joke there are platforms that were so ahead of their time they are still ahead of ours. The AS&amp;#x2F;400 is one such thing. It concerns me IBM doesn&amp;#x27;t seem to provide enough entry-level resources (and I believe nobody would do a green field project on IBMi that required a company to invest on the platform unless it already had a sizeable investment on it). For all three of their crown jewels, AIX, Z and i, IBM is doing a terrible job in onboarding new clients.&lt;p&gt;BTW, I&amp;#x27;ve been trying to set up a small AIX box to do some software testing (and not make the mistake of making a Unix app dependent on linuxisms) on IBM cloud and, even when you navigate the confusing UI and metaphors (there is no &amp;quot;give me a POWER10 AIX VM with this many vCPUS, this much memory and this much disk&amp;quot; option), it&amp;#x27;s failing for me for unfathomable reasons while trying to create a storage volume with the default options. On a side note, I can create a Linux VM running on s390x from the same flow I create x86 ones, but I can&amp;#x27;t select a z&amp;#x2F;OS disk image, or a POWER processor. If I want a z&amp;#x2F;OS machine, I have to go through an entirely different workflow (one I went through, only to never be able to figure out the IP addresses I could ssh to).</text></comment>
<story><title>IBM AS/400: Databases all the way down (2019) [video]</title><url>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDSgJE5mPJM</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>LeftHandPath</author><text>I have worked with these extensively - my employer uses one for work, and I have written software both in the greenscreen &amp;#x2F; ILE languages and in the PASE environment &amp;#x2F; IFS to accomplish certain tasks (e.g. setting up an intranet site with PHP to present pretty-fied reports of what&amp;#x27;s in the databases).&lt;p&gt;I think one of my favorite things about it is actually IBM&amp;#x27;s Data Description Specification (DDS) [0]. You use it for the same reason you&amp;#x27;d use a `CREATE TABLE` statement in SQL, but the syntax is much more legible &amp;#x2F; suited for that purpose, and the file is stored permanently (and used to spool up a &amp;quot;physical file&amp;quot; with the given format, where the data is actually stored).&lt;p&gt;Definitely encourage anyone who is curious about these &amp;#x2F; esoteric OS&amp;#x27;s in general to look into them - you can get hands on through IBM&amp;#x27;s &amp;quot;Cloud for Co-Creation and Enablement&amp;quot; (I believe it&amp;#x27;s been renamed) or PUB400 [1].&lt;p&gt;[0]: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.ibm.com&amp;#x2F;docs&amp;#x2F;en&amp;#x2F;i&amp;#x2F;7.3?topic=files-describing-using-data-description-specifications-dds&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.ibm.com&amp;#x2F;docs&amp;#x2F;en&amp;#x2F;i&amp;#x2F;7.3?topic=files-describing-usi...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[1]: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.pub400.com&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.pub400.com&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>