DB2 Express-C Team Blog

Scott Hayes of DBI Software has been running an excellent series of seminars called The DB2Night Show. There's one coming up this Friday on the subject of DB2 performance:

DB2 LUW Performance Update & Best Practices
Friday, April 30, 2010
9am Eastern, 10am Central

In the DB2 LUW Community, Berni Schiefer is a man that doesn't need an introduction - but, just in case you are newer to DB2 LUW (like one of the many Oracle converts), Berni is "the performance guy". He's a Distinguished Engineer who leads the Information Management Performance and Benchmarks team at the IBM Toronto Lab. Berni has been a frequent speaker at IDUG conferences and other venues, and he gives terrific presentations that share DB2 Performance Benchmark results and performance best practices.

• Reserve your seat

Cheers,

Leons Petrazickis
DB2 Express-C Community Team

The Bulgarian translation of the Getting Started with DB2 Express-C book series is now available:

• Въведение в DB2 Express-C
• Quicklab Exercises

Books in the Getting Started series have been downloaded over 80,000 times. The DB2 book is now available in English, Japanese, Bulgarian, Chinese, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Thai, and Vietnamese.

If you are interested in helping to translate the book into your language, please drop us a line at db2x @ ca.ibm.com

Cheers,

Leons Petrazickis
DB2 Express-C Community Team

The DB2 usability team is offering an honorarium in exchange for filling out a survey about DB2:

Here's an opportunity to provide your input directly to the folks who develop DB2 by filling out an online survey. Those who complete the survey will receive an honorarium in recognition of the time they spent providing this feedback.

If you're interested in filling out the online survey about your experiences with DB2 then send an email to ucdacts@ca.ibm.com with the following information and someone will get back to you with the details of how to get started.

• Your name
• Preferred e-mail address for contacting you about the survey
• Your phone number (optional)
• Number of months/years using DB2 for Linux, UNIX, Windows

The survey involves up to 25 multiple-choice questions as well as a written feedback component.

Thanks!

There's an upcoming DB2 Chat with the Lab on Tuesday, April 27th:

DB2 Chat: Introducing DB2 Health Advisor Service
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
11:30 AM - 1:00 PM Eastern / 10:30 AM Central / 8:30 AM Pacific / 16:30 hrs London / 17:30 hrs Frankfurt, Paris / India 9PM

This Chat introduces the DB2 Health Advisor Service (HAS). It is a support as a software service technology that is non-intrusive and utilizes up to date analytics from subject matter experts across DB2. The main goal of the service is to leverage the expertise and knowledge back at IBM to productively avoid problems, reduce the bar of adoption, lower total cost of ownership and return on investment when using DB2. It is based on best practices and customer knowledge database. DB2 HAS architecture and main components built using the latest IBM technology (Cognos, CEP, DWE, etc.) are presented. Usage scenarios for the service are explained in details.

To learn about DB2 HAS and get your questions answered, join experts form the IBM Toronto Lab: Sal Vella, VP of Development, Mark Wilding, STSM and HAS Architect, and Alexander Abrashkevich, DB2 HAS Lead Developer.

• Register for this event
• More information

Cheers,

Leons Petrazickis
DB2 Express-C Community Team

The Japanese translation of the Getting Started with DB2 Express-C free e-book series is now available:

• DB2 Express-C 入門 V9.7 対応
• Exercises

Books in the Getting Started series have been downloaded over 80,000 times. The DB2 book is now available in English, Japanese, Chinese, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Thai, and Vietnamese.

Naturally, the DB2 Express-C free database server is also available in English, Japanese, and other languages.

Cheers,

Leons Petrazickis
DB2 Express-C Community Team

IDUG is the International DB2 User Group, an independent community organization of DB2 users. They have a 2010 North American conference coming up on May 11-14 in Tampa, Florida.

In my experience, conferences are a great place to learn and make contacts. IDUG 2010 North America will have 105 hours of technical sessions on DB2 and related subjects as well as several IBM-sponsored hands-on labs.

Cheers,

Leons Petrazickis
DB2 Express-C Community Team

Data Studio is a free utility for managing DB2 databases. It has SQL and XQuery syntax highlighting, code validation, and tools for helping you build stored procedures and various other database objects. You can use it to explore a database by drilling down through schemas, tables, and so on. Naturally, you can use it to create databases.

Click on the "Create database" button in the "Data Source Explorer" pane.

You want to create a DB2 for Linux UNIX Windows (LUW) database. Before DB2 9, LUW was known as UDB.


Enter the following values and test the connection:

• DB2 as the instance name. DB2 is the default instance name on Windows. You can find out the name of your instance by issuing the db2set -g command.
• localhost as the host. This refers to your own computer.
• 50000 as the port. This is the default DB2 port.
• Your own username on Windows, or the DB2 instance owner username (typically db2inst1) on Linux.
• The corresponding password.

Enter a name and location for the database and then click Run to create the it.

• TEST is as good a database name as any for our purposes.
• On Windows, you generally enter a drive letter like C: or D: for the database path. On Linux, you should enter a full path like /db2/data

Congratulations! Your database is ready for use.

Downloads

• DB2 Express-C - Free database server.
• Data Studio Standalone - Utility for writing SQL and XQuery code as well as managing databases.
• Data Studio IDE - Adds the ability to create Java stored procedures and web services.
• Getting Started with Data Studio for DB2 - Free e-book.

Cheers,

Leons Petrazickis
DB2 Express-C Community Team

The next DB2 Chat with the Lab is on April 8th:

Developing and Prototyping Database Applications in Cloud
Thursday, April 8, 2010
2:30 - 3:30 PM Eastern / 1:30 PM Central / 11:30 AM Pacific
Speaker: Leon Katsnelson

Prototyping, developing and testing database applications is a leading use-case for cloud systems. In this session, we’ll discuss options, strategies, and best practices for prototyping and developing database applications for public and private cloud computing platforms. Several demos on different cloud platforms will be used illustrate concepts and walk through getting started with IBM databases in the cloud.

• Register for this event
• Get more information

Cheers,

Leons Petrazickis
DB2 Express-C Community Team

Django is a Python-based web framework designed for rapid development and pragmatic design. The latest release of the IBM Adapter for Django now supports Django 1.2.

Enhancements to the adapter include automatic use of persistent connections as well as built-in support for the hardware-accelerated DECIMAL datatype, frequently used to represent currency.

A big thank you goes to Antonio Cangiano for writing about the release.

• Get DB2 Express-C


• Get Django


• Get the IBM Adapter for Django

Cheers,

Leons Petrazickis
DB2 Express-C Community Team