Thursday, June 22, 2006

Generate excellent test data quickly and cheaply

Website: Fake Name Generator


When I saw this site mentioned on BoingBoing, I probably did not have the same initial reaction as most of its readers, who are usually looking for a convenient way to feed gibberish to the countless websites that require some sort of registration. When I saw the Fake Name Generator, I immediately saw a handy way to generate plausible test data for database applications. From the site's main page, you can pull off fake people one at a time for free, or you can buy addresses in bulk for as little as one twentieth of a penny each. Even the credit card numbers it generates pass validation. Since 2000 plausible addresses can be had for only a buck, this service is a compelling alternative to coding your own data generator.

Tuesday, June 13, 2006

Webcast about DB2 9 compression this Thursday

June 15th webcast: DB2 Chat with the Lab - Using Data Compression to Cut Costs


It's difficult to overstate the impact of this one feature on DB2's overall performance. Simply put, compression means more rows per page, and therefore reduced page I/O cost for a given workload. The technology behind it is pretty slick, so you may want to read up on it a bit beforehand.


Also, I'd like to thank IBM for offering free transcripts of their previous DB2 9 webcasts. It is nice to see so much effort going into educating people about this release.

Friday, June 09, 2006

No Viper, no V, just 9, and it's coming soon

ZDNet article: IBM plays XML card in effort to beat Oracle


It was good to see the UDB letters dropped a couple months ago, and now there won't even be a V to deal with anymore. The next version of DB2 will simply be called DB2 9. The article mentions a release date of next month and reveals the new pricing as well.