2026 Fortra survey published

This year's Fortra 2026 IBM i Marketplace Survey results has been published. This is the twelfth year of the survey, and I for one, always find it an interesting read to learn what the other members of the IBM i community are up to.

If you did not participate in this year's survey I would like to strongly encourage you to participate in the next, as it is a good insight as to what is important to people and companies using IBM i.

You can read it here.

You can also watch the discussion about the survey with Steve Will, IBM i CTO and Chief Architect, Tom Huntington, Fortra, Kris Whitney, IBM i Chief Engineer, Tomothy Prickett Morgan, IT Jungle, here.

SEND_MESSAGE can now send message to any message queue

When SEND_MESSAGE SQL procedure was introduced in 2021, as part of IBM i 7.3 TR10 and 7.4 TR4, it would be used to send messages to the System operator message queue. I have used this many times to do so, but I have always wondered how I could do the same to any message queue? Well, in the latest Technology Refreshes, IBM i 7.6 TR1 and 7.5 TR7, this functionality was added.

Two new parameters were added to the procedure to make this possible:

• MESSAGE_QUEUE_LIBRARY:  The library that contains the message queue I want to send the message to
• MESSAGE_QUEUE:  The message queue I want to send the message to

If I omit these parameters the message will be sent to the System operator message queue.

The first example I am going to show is using the procedure as it was intended, sending a message to the System operator message queue. I am going to use the message id CPF9898, which is a general escape message, i.e. I can provide any text I want for the message to use. I can show this using the MESSAGE_FILE_DATA SQL View:

February's presentations

I will be involved with one event this month:

Tuesday February 17, starting at 8:30 AM (CT), I will making a two hour presentation at COMMON's Focus conference. This is an online events that spans two days, Tuesday and Wednesday.

You can learn more about it, who will be speaking and what about, and register here.

I hope to see you there!

End of support for small Power9 effective tomorrow

Tomorrow, January 31, 2026, is the End of Support, EoS, for the small Power9 servers:

• L922 (9008-22L)
• S922 (9009-22A)
• S914 (9009-41A)
• S924 (9009-42A)
• H922 (9223-22H)
• H924 (9223-42H)

You can read the announcement for this from January 2025 here.

What does end of support mean?

After End of Standard Service, IBM no longer provides preventive service, new updates or fixes, or development of new machine code updates, patches, or fixes (including security fixes).

Extended Support is available for these models, see here.

I do not see any information for the EoS of the larger Power9s, E950 and E980.

Better examples for creating and consuming JSON

Whenever I am asked for an example of how to generate a JSON array or how to consume JSON data I have to point people to different posts, rather than have one that covers both. I have written this post to be that, examples of how to create and how to consume JSON.

I will be using Db2 for i to generate JSON, as I find it simpler to use than doing the equivalent in RPG.

I am going to give four examples in this post to show how to generate a simple JSON array, one with labels and the other without. Then consume the generated JSON into a format that can be easily processed by RPG. All of these examples are going to use embedded SQL in RPG programs.

I will be using my PERSON DDL Table for the input for these examples. What I want to do is to create a JSON containing:

RPG BiFs that now convert CCSID

As the computing world has become more "open" we need to process data that comes in different character sets, not just the EBCDIC CCSID in the IBM i partitions we are working on. Modern RPG has been able to handle all of the character sets, with various Built in Functions, BiF, to convert the character set from one to another.

The RPG PTFs that accompanied new Technology Refreshes, IBM i 7.6 TR1 and IBM i 7.5 TR7, included an improvement to character handling. Some BiFs will now automatically match the character types of the data in the variables used. This post is going to explain what they are, and any errors I found.

The BiFs that do this implicit CCSID conversion are:

New ACS update, 1.1.9.11, fixes vulnerability

On Tuesday, January 14, an announcement was posted on the IBM's ACS Updates page:

IBM i Access Client Solutions is vulnerable to an attacker carrying out an XML External Entity injection via a crafted XFA file inside of a PDF.

Apache Tika is used by the Run SQL Scripts feature to determine the content type of binary column data in a table on the IBM i.

IBM strongly recommends upgrading to 1.1.9.11, and discontinuing use of versions 1.1.9.8 through 1.1.9.10.

The download was not available until Wednesday morning. When I received the following alert when starting my ACS:

Another way to list files defined in Querys

After writing the post about Retrieving the print file name from a Query it struck me that I could use the same methodology to answer a question I have been asked on several occasions: Which Querys are using a particular file?

I cannot answer which Querys are using a file. I can list all the files that Querys are defined to use.

What are the steps I need to perform to get that information:

1. Make a list of all the Querys in a particular library
2. Print their definitions using PRINT_QUERY_DEFINITION
3. Extract the file names from the spool file, and write them to an output file

I am going to show you how I manually executed the above steps. And then I will show a program I created to do the same thing.

First, I need to make a list of all the Querys in a library, MYLIB. I will use the OBJECT_STATISTICS SQL Table function.

01 SELECT OBJLIB,OBJNAME 02 FROM TABLE(QSYS2.OBJECT_STATISTICS('MYLIB','*QRYDFN','*ALL'))

Line 1: I only want the Query library and name in my results.

A new way to list columns for SQL insert

The latest Technology Refreshes introduced a new way to give the columns I am inserting with an SQL Insert statement into a Table or file.

This is the DDL Table I will be inserting into:

01 CREATE TABLE RPGPGM1.TEST_TABLE 02 (IDENTITY BIGINT GENERATED ALWAYS AS IDENTITY NOT NULL, 03 LAST_NAME FOR COLUMN "LNAME" VARCHAR(30), 04 FIRST_NAME FOR COLUMN "FNAME" VARCHAR(20), 05 ADDRESS_CITY FOR COLUMN "CITY" VARCHAR(20), 06 ADDRESS_STATE FOR COLUMN "STATE" CHAR(2), 07 ADDRESS_COUNTRY FOR COLUMN "COUNTRY" CHAR(3)) ;

Happy New Year 2026 to you all

New Years is one of my favorite times of year, as we are filled with the excitement for what 2026 will bring us all.

Before we put our feelings and thoughts of 2025 behind us, what did you find interesting last year? These were the top ten popular posts from last year:

Find where a command is used in programs

A friend had been tasked to determine which programs used a particular CL command. When telling me about this she mentioned a CL command I had never used: Print Command Usage, PRTCMDUSG. She had used this command to check which CLP programs used the CL command.

Never having used this command, I wanted to try it for myself. I created a scenario where I wanted to find all the programs in my library that use the CL command DSPOBJD.

I created three programs with the DSPOBJD. The first I called TESTCL1, as a modern CLLE program:

01 DLTF FILE(QTEMP/OUTFILE) 02 MONMSG MSGID(CPF2105) 03 DSPOBJD OBJ(MYLIB/*ALL) + 04 OBJTYPE(*FILE) + 05 OUTPUT(*OUTFILE) + 06 OUTFILE(QTEMP/OUTFILE)

The second program, TESTCL2, I created as an OPM CLP program.

Saving using the ZLIB algorithm

ZLIB was introduced as an improved save compression algorithm as part of IBM i 7.4. With IBM Power10 processors the algorithm uses the on-chip Nest Accelerator (NX) GZIP, therefore, it is faster, less CPU intensive, and produces a smaller save file than other compression routines. I wanted to try it out to see how big a difference it would make.

First thing I need to do is to check if the IBM Power server and model I will be performing my tests upon is at least a Power 10. I can get the model number from the system values, but I cannot get the system type. The most convenient place I know to get that is from the API QLZARCAPI. After running the following:

01 CALL QSYS/QLZARCAPI

And I look in the job log I can see information on the first line of data:

SYSTEM INFO -> SYSTEM SERIAL NUMBER: XX-XXXXX . SYSTEM TYPE-MODEL: 9105-22A.

I admit I do not know all the system types and model numbers, therefore, I googled it and found that I am on an IBM Power S1022.