Last minute reminder for May 24th DB2 Chat with the Lab

DB2 Viper Early Community Website DB2 Chat with the Lab - DB2 Viper

If you're up late at night looking at blogs when you should be asleep, you might see this recommendation before it's too late. This talk, cheduled to begin at 8am PDT, will cover exciting new features in Viper, including range table partioning and large RID support. If you do end up missing it, you can always look up the transcript after the call.

DB2 FixPak 12 available for download

IBM Support: DB2 Universal Database Version 8 FixPak 12 (also known as Version 8.2 FixPak 5)

It's been out for a couple weeks, and IBM hasn't had to rush out a FixPak 12a already, so perhaps it's ready for you to play with on some of your servers. As always, the typical warnings apply: drink plenty of water, wear sunscreen, and always try out a new FixPak on a test system first. Have fun...

Influence the future of IDUG and win prizes

IDUG website: IDUG Survey for DB2 LUW and z/OS Users

The folks at IDUG are surveying the opinions and needs of all types of DB2 users in order to adjust IDUG's current services as well as create new offerings. All survey participants are eligible to win either a 50" plasma screen television or one of two dozen iPods, so be sure to fill one out and recommend the survey to your colleagues if they also use DB2.

Just how much of a liability is DB2's GUI?

InfoWorld Database Underground blog: What is the Future of DB2?

This InfoWorld blog post does have some undisputed facts: Sean McCown has written about MS SQL Server in the past, and his spell checker is broken. The rest is a bit more speculative and debatable.

So, DB2 has impressive features, but its marketing strategy and clunky GUI are holding it back. Is it as simple as that? Is the release of Express-C of any help in increasing DB2's market share? Does Gartner's recent forecast of strong growth for DB2 take its allegedly meager GUI tools into account?

Although vague on details, I still consider the opinions in the InfoWorld blog post to be food for thought. Many DB2 DBAs I have talked to proudly claim they shunned most if not all of the GUI tools long ago. Would this stance be less common if DB2 had better GUI tools? If so, perhaps it's time more people participated in IBM's user feedback opportunities, either at DB2 conferences or right at an IBM lab.

IBM's Bob Picciano kicks off IDUG 2006 conference in Tampa

Robert J. Picciano, VP of Information Management Sales at IBM, delivered an optimistic keynote address today at the 2006 IDUG/IIUG North America conference in Tampa, FL. Here are some of the happy numbers he mentioned during his talk:

• 150+ IBM products use IBM Cloudscape as their embedded SQL database


• 2x growth of XML database investment over SQL databases industrywide


• $1B committed by IBM toward various new software investments


• 40% of all corporate data is stored as XML (at least temporarily)


• 150 business partners participated in the Viper closed beta


• 1.5x to 8.7x performance improvement realized in tests of Viper's compression features


• 70% of data management costs are for storage, which bodes well for Viper compression


• 19% of all respondents in a March 2006 Gartner survey intend to move to DB2 in the immediate future


• 35000 copies of DB2 Express-C have been downloaded from IBM's site


• 10000 copies of the PHP driver for DB2 have been downloaded

Informix (also referred to as IBM IDS) is still going strong, with solid market penetration in the retail sector and the US 911 phone system, among others. Picciano also introduced Arvind Krishna, a long-time IBMer who would be moving into the position held by Picciano prior to his recent promotion.

I thought I should also mention that IDUG is keeping a conference blog as well.