DataThread ushers in a new generation of database auditing for IBM i servers.

Written by Robin Tatam

While we often hear that it's the people that are an organization's greatest asset, I think many would agree that data comes in at a photo-finish second place. Without it, most businesses couldn't take orders, manufacture and distribute products, invoice customers, or make timely business decisions. Data is the lifeblood of the technology infrastructure that our enterprise runs on, and without it the modern enterprise cannot survive.

How do you leverage business information easily for on-the-spot analysis?

Written by Floyd Del Muro

Do you need to extract transaction data to your PC for analysis? Is there too much data for your PC to handle? Do you need to move the data in a spreadsheet for ease of use? Does your team need to take the data on the road to critical accounts?

Adopting authority enables users to drive the car to the store and back yet stay off the highway. To ensure no one ends up in the ditch, you must know where the keys are at all times.

Written by Steven C. Pitcher

Adoption of authority is a solution to the problem of having users who need to execute commands that are otherwise forbidden based on their current IBM i authority level.

For example, your helpdesk personnel must have the ability to re-enable user profiles that have been disabled, but you don't want to give them *SECADM special authority and access to the Change User Profile (CHGUSRPRF) command.

PowerTech Compliance Monitor v3.0 ushers in the next generation of advanced audit reporting for IBM i.

Written by Robin Tatam

Audits are a way of life in today's regulated world. Whether it's Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), the Payment Card Industry (PCI), or the multitude of other government and industry standards, few organizations escape the reach of one or more of these regulations. Unfortunately, there are few things that drive fear into the heart of IT personnel more than the arrival of an auditor: "What are they going to ask to see?" "Do I have to explain what *JOBCTL means again?" "How can I get all my normal work done when I have to figure out how to report on the very information that will be used to penalize me?"

Your options have been pretty limited…until now!

Written by Mike Savino

If you work in a large shop, you probably have hundreds of scheduled batch jobs that run throughout the month. And if you're lucky enough to be using a third-party scheduling tool, you might have canned reports and the ability to query the underlying data in ways that make it easy to figure out who's running the job, when it runs, and what command or program it executes.

Get ready for your 2011 development projects.

Written by Floyd Del Muro

Remember the "good old days" when all we had to worry about was a simple "new-century problem" known as Y2K? Many companies rolled up their sleeves, dug in, and handled that project with fixes: rebuilding, recompiling, and re?creating code.

How do you monitor the IFS and temporary storage growth?

Written by Tom Huntington

You know the all-too?familiar cry from your staff: "Where did the disk space go? Who is responsible for consuming the entire disk?" As a good administrator, you rerun the reports from the past weekend, but you can't find the reason. The library disk reports show that the disk space is the same, yet your WRKSYSSTS disk space percentage is at 92 percent. The culprit may be IFS growth or temporary storage consumption.

Don't let improperly managed deleted records slow down system performance.

Written by Sandra Cabral

When records are deleted or marked for deletion, they may remain as part of the physical file. It is a good practice to run the RGZPFM command to remove deleted records and free up DASD. Removing deleted records can improve performance of programs that read a file sequentially. It can also help reduce the paging of data in from DASD to memory. The recommendation is to run RGZPFM if the number of deleted records exceeds 20 percent of the total number of records in the file.