World Economic Forum, Parking Problems, and DB2 pureXML

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The World Economic Forum in Davos certainly is interesting, at least from a perspective of logistics and data. A lot of the big and famous try to be there. And who has thought that parking is a problem?

When you want to fly into Davos, you usually fly into Zurich airport (ZRH) or the airport in Friedrichshafen (FDH). The latter is close to where I live and this morning it was still serving as a parking lot for small and big private jets from around the world. Some of the VIPs have been flying directly into FDH and changed into helicopters or cars, but a good chunk opted for the "fly to Zurich, park your jet in Friedrichshafen" option. For the average guy it seem funny that even with some money behind you get into parking problems. Well, not the regular ones...

How do I get the drift to database systems? You cannot just fly to an airport and hope for the best. There is some trip planning and logistics involved, and a lot of communication. These days, parking your vehicle needs some extra communication. The more efficient the better.

Now to DB2 and pureXML: A lot of applications send XML to the database or retrieve it from the database. So far it meant that the sender had to produce text-based XML data from its internal structures, the receiver had to parse it and produce its internal structures. Both takes time and costs money (we are living in a fast world). Starting with DB2 10 for z/OS, both the DB2 client and server use binary XML, a special optimized format for encoding XML documents. This allows to produce the "on the wire" representation faster and is also simpler to process on the receiving side. Communication made faster and more efficient, a better chance to find a parking space for your vehicle of choice...?

The Cloud, Mood-Enhancing Substances, World Economic Forum, and More

DataWorks and Connect & Compose

Right now, the Winter sky is mostly covered by some low hanging clouds, giving way only for some random rays of sun. The past weeks I have been plagued by a cold which drew most of my energy. Now I am back, thanks to some mood-enhancing substances (a.k.a. lots of dark chocolate) and some rest. So what else, in addition to the usual World Economic Forum, is going on?

VIP jets, clouds, and DB2 on cloud

Two years ago I wrote about the "parking problems" at the meeting of the World Economic Forum. The annual meeting of the World Economic Forum is taking place in Davos, Switzerland, and many of the participants have to fly in through the Zurich (ZRH) or Friedrichshafen (FDH) airports. (I have not been invited so far, but could go there by car. Any invitations...?)

This year's meeting is about to start and so it happens that out of the clouds business jets descend to Friedrichshafen and more helicopters can be seen. With that impression on my mind I came back from an after lunch walk and asked myself: Where is a good overview of cloud offerings for DB2? Well, it seems it is on this page at IBM developerWorks. Offerings like the IBM SmartCloud Enterprise and services like the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud and RightScale are listed. There are also some cloud computing resources at the bottom of that page.

While I continue to wait for an invitation to the World Economic Forum in Davos, you can directly get started with DB2 on the cloud.

Hello again, Davos, AI ethics, cybersecurity, Db2 events and IBM Cloud

Hello, here I am again after a while. I hope you had a good start into 2019. I enjoyed being offline for a while, then got busy with not much time to blog. So, here is a roundup of things going on.