Free DB2 vs SQL Server + Cloud

There is an upcoming episode of the DB2Night Show that will contrast DB2 Express-C with Microsoft SQL Server as well as touch on the Cloud, Oracle, MySQL, and other subjects:

The DB2Night Show Episode #7- 4 Dec 2009 - SQL Server vs. DB2

Secure your seat in our virtual real-time studio audience as we take a look at SQL Server Express versus DB2 Express-C. Our special guest will be Leon Katsnelson from IBM. If you have responsibility for SQL Server and DB2, or want to know the differences, or are looking at low cost commodity hardware database options, you won't want to miss this show!

The DB2Night Show has a Twitter account - please follow twitter.com/db2nightshow for the latest news about new episodes and interactive discussion. Use the hash tag #DB2Night in your Tweets.

We hope you will join us and participate as a guest or via twitter.com/db2nightshow. The more people we have involved during the recording of the show, the more fun we'll have. One studio audience member will be randomly selected to win an Amazon.com gift certificate - just in time for the holidays!

Friday December 4th
11am Eastern, 10am Central, 9am Mountain, 8am Pacific

Register

Regards,

Leons Petrazickis
DB2 Express-C Community Team

Get DB2 Express-C 9.7.1 now

The 9.7.1 refresh of the DB2 Express-C free database server is now available:

• DB2 Express-C for Windows


• DB2 Express-C for Windows x64


• DB2 Express-C for Linux


• DB2 Express-C for Linux x86-64


• DB2 Express-C for Linux on POWER


• DB2 Express-C for Solaris x86-64

What's new

There are many new fixes and features including:
- OUT and INOUT parameters for user-defined functions
- Global variable assignment in nested contexts
- Enhanced diagnostics and logging
- Progress indicators for RUNSTATS and reorg of tables and indexes
- Transparent LDAP on Linux and Solaris
- Improved .NET integration
- Many other improvements

Cheers,

Leons Petrazickis
DB2 Express-C Community Team

Webinar: Using IBM DB2 on Amazon EC2 cloud

There's an upcoming web seminar on using IBM DB2 on Amazon EC2. EC2 is a cloud offering from Amazon that lets you host any software on a virtual machine on the public internet.

IBM DB2 - Using the most flexible enterprise-class database on Amazon EC2
Date: 2009-Oct-1
Time: 12:00 EDT, 17:00 London
Length: 1 hour
Speakers: Mark Wilding, Leon Katsnelson

IBM DB2 database software running on Amazon EC2 lets you get the most out of today's tough economic climate that is charaterized by reduced budgets and freezes on capital expenditure. IBM and AWS provide a lot of flexibility for cloud computing, including free DB2 AMIs, low cost by-the-hour production-ready DB2 AMIs, and the ability to bring your existing DB2 licenses to the cloud. With robust capabilities for the most demanding workloads, and tons of autonomic features, DB2 is ideally suited for cloud environments.

Join us to learn how to quickly develop and deploy new and existing applications using DB2 and Amazon EC2. This session will walk you through the DB2 AMIs and highlight some of the unique capabilities in DB2, including the new features in DB2 9.7 that make it much easier to move applications from Oracle to DB2.

Register now

This is part of a whole day of sessions that cover Amazon Web Services, Informix, DB2, WebSphere, Lotus, and other topics.

Burn DVDs of DB2 Express-C

The DB2 9.7 Discovery Kit is now out. It includes the free DB2 Express-C database server, the free Data Studio administrative tool, and a number of other tools and accessories. The kit is available in ISO format, which is a DVD data image that can be written to disk by most DVD burners:

• Get the DB2 9.7 Discovery Kit

If you are simply looking to deploy DB2 Express-C or Data Studio on your machine, you can quickly download them here:

• Get the free DB2 Express-C database server
• Get the free Data Studio database administration gui

Cheers,

Leons Petrazickis
DB2 Express-C Community Team

DB2 driver for PHP

The Windows build of the ibm_db2 extension for PHP is currently available for download at the IBM Database Wiki. The DB2 at UofT blog recently posted some installation instructions.

Linux users can get the extension directly from PECL.

Regards,

Leons Petrazickis
DB2 Express-C Community Team

Webinar - Database Scalability in the Cloud

On Tuesday July 28, there's a live web seminar on scaling database performance:

Join IBM and xkoto to get beyond the hype of the cloud and learn how to ensure scalability for mission-critical applications in the cloud. We'll show you step-by-step approaches to scaling transaction-intensive workloads and help you avoid some of the pitfalls along the way. You'll also see a live demonstration of IBM DB2 and xkoto GRIDSCALE scaling database workloads across active-active database servers hosted on Amazon EC2.

Attend this Webinar to learn how to:
* Understand Amazon's server and storage infrastructures
* Avoid the scalability constraints in the cloud
* Provision and configure database workloads
* Scale databases horizontally to meet application demand

Speaker Panel:
* Leon Katsnelson, Program Director, IBM
* Ariff Kassam, CTO, xkoto
* Rav Ahuja, Senior Product Manager, IBM
* Paul Lapointe, Solutions Architect, xkoto

Scalability in the Cloud: Fact or Fiction?

Tue, Jul 28, 2009 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM EDT
Tue, Jul 28, 2009 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM London
Tue, Jul 28, 2009 9:30 PM - 10:30 PM India

Cheers,

Leons Petrazickis
DB2 Express-C Community Team

IDUG backs up DB2 logs to Amazon S3

Rob Williams recently did a lot of volunteer work to rebuild the IBM DB2 User Group (IDUG) website. It now runs on the free DB2 Express-C database.

For easy backup and recovery, Rob set up archiving of DB2 logs to Amazon S3.

There are no upfront costs; you only pay for what you use. The current price for this service is around $0.150 per GB per month and $0.10 per GB for data transfer. By the time you factor in all the costs for a tape system and Tivoli storage manager, this can be a very cost effective way to backup small DB2 databases with a proven technology.

Check out Rob's scripts and maybe consider setting up your own solution.

Cheers,

Leons Petrazickis
DB2 Express-C Community Team

Run DB2 Express-C on IBM Developer Cloud

IBM has just launched the Develop and Test on the IBM Developer Cloud site. Right now this is a free service where you can sign up and create virtual machine instances of IBM products like DB2 Express-C running in the cloud (i.e. on the internet).

So, if you want to set up a new DB2 server in a couple minutes, just mosey over to the IBM Developer Cloud, register, and instantiate a machine or two. You'll then be able to access it like any other copy of DB2:
- via DB2 command line
- from Data Studio
- from your PHP or Rails web application
- remotely via SSH
- etc.

Very handy.

On Windows, I personally like to use PuTTY for SSH and WinSCP for SCP and SFTP (basically, FTP over SSH).

Using DB2 Express-C on IBM Developer Cloud from ChannelDB2 on Vimeo.

Regards,

Leons Petrazickis
DB2 Express-C Community Team