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: