The Omni User put on its annual 1 day technical conference in Schaumburg, IL, Tuesday September 19th 2017. The
organizers delivered on their promise of an event... providing great value, with education content including the latest in relational database capabilities, IBM i Admin,
and business application software development on the IBM i platform. The conference started with a keynote on Watson and integrating with Watson.
Tegratecs had a booth in the vendor exhibit area, highlighting various strengths in their offerings, including
its Financial Portrait accounting suite and smartclient, ETL, and top quality custom development services.
Click here for
Tegratecs software and service offerings of focus at Omni Tech Conference 2017
One common denominator for most everyone in IT is SQL and relational database. This
year Scott Forstie from IBM presented on late breaking features such as Row and Column Access Control. With
this new Db2 for i capability, you can define rules that restrict data access to certain users using syntax similar to SQL where
clauses and joins. Use of this technique in the future can remove objections to providing direct data
access to users who are self-sufficient in creating their own reports and inquiries for analysis and Business
Intelligence agendas.
Read this next paragraph for further technical insight on how Row Access Control might be implemented.
The row access control technique is not implemented at the application programming level, but
instead a new database admin security level, so it proactively prevents even read access to unauthorized portions of data for
query users and any other ad-hoc methods of data access. However, if you already have existing application level security or
permissions data represented in database form, especially that which determines data ownership and access rights at a more granular
level than the IBM i OS, you would definitely want to use that data in the new Row Access Control specifications. A fairly simple but practical
example could be one that determines which companies can be accessed by IBM i User Profile in a multi-company environment (such as PRMS or
Financial Portrait Software System). The only thing you need (to be in position), are relational links between User Profile and
company ID (Db2 rows containing pairings of User Profile with authorized company ID).
Another new feature in Db2 involves temporal table support, which provides for SQL access to see table(s) as they existed at any point in the past, including
records that have long since been deleted. Obviously rows that are deleted before the temporal table support is turned on for a given table aren’t available.
There were 3 other tracks of presentations. Pete Massiello talked about IBM i admin topics including Virtual i Partitions and key
things to know for your IBM i 7.3, 7.2 or 7.1 OS upgrades. Tim Rowe, an excellent source for information about the latest happenings in the
IBM i area, did several sessions, which include good details about the RDi IDE, which has new features added recently to
accommodate refactoring.
Barbara Morris is a very insightful presenter with a lot of insider knowledge. Omni event organizers were very pleased to be able to have Barbara present
several sessions from remote. A special request was a session recapping many of the new RPG Free features that have been brought to fruition since IBM i 7.1 (a
big leap forward), and another focused on new support for handling null values in RPG (along with some candid insights) and more.
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