Db2 2 V11.1 Mod Pack4 and Fix Pack 4 is available

New Db2 Mod / Fix Pack

The latest product update for Db2 is out, Mod Pack 4 and Fix Pack 4. You can read about the new features (because it is a Mod Pack) in this Mod Pack and Fix Pack Updates document. Here are some of the focus areas:

• There are several improvements to High Availability when using HADR.
• db2pd has a new option "-barstats" to monitor progress and performance of backup and restore operations.
• ADMIN_MOVE_TABLE has seen some enhancements, including a new ESTIMATE option.
• Application developers benefit from new JSON support that features functions like JSON_QUERY, JSON_TABLE and JSON_EXISTS (Hello, XML developers!).
• Several new data sources can be integrated using the federation capability. This includes SAP HANA, HDFS parquet files and CouchDB.
• A long list of Db2 pureScale improvements for performance, administration and monitoring.

And if you are curious about ongoing product enhancements to Db2 on Cloud, Db2 Warehouse and Db2 Warehouse on Cloud, then check out this related "What's New in..." page.

If you have feedback, suggestions, or questions about this post, please reach out to me on Twitter (@data_henrik) or LinkedIn.

IBM Cloud: The 5 minute barebone news chatbot

News chatbot with Watson Assistant

Do you have 5 minutes and want to build a really simple news chatbot? I tried this yesterday with IBM Cloud and the Watson Assistant and Discovery services. The result is on GitHub in my repository watson-chatbot-discovery-news. It utilizes my Watson Conversation Tool as user interface and for testing. Here are the details.

Incorporate Git and IBM Cloud information into BASH command prompt

Many of you know that I love to use the command line. Because my day to day work includes interfacing IBM Cloud and GitHub, I have changed the BASH configuration to include related information into the command prompt. Here is what I did and how it looks like.

IBM Watson Assistant: Chatbot tool now supports testing client actions

Test your chatbot

Are you (already) using the Watson Conversation Tool I wrote? There is good news because I added support for testing client side actions. As you might know, IBM Watson Assistant features both client and server side actions to enhance responses with data from external services. In a blog post from this Summer, I wrote that I added support for testing server side actions. They are implemented using IBM Cloud Functions. Client actions are, well, executed on the application side. Read on to learn how to test them.