Monday, April 27, 2009

Passive House, Electric Cars, Noise, and DB2 diagnostics


It's a little bit over a year now that we live in our passive house. Thanks to 48cm thick walls and 4 pane windows it is mostly quiet inside the house, even with the flight path to/from FDH being very close.
What we are not missing from the US is the sound of Harleys, sometimes large groups of them. A lot of noise, you can hear and feel them approaching.

Putting that into perspective, I read about US lawmakers considering adding a requirement for non-visual alerts for motor vehicles (Pedestrian Safety Enhancement Act of 2009), i.e., to make so far quiet electric and hybrid cars louder. Worldwide everybody else seems to work towards making things quieter (reducing noise emissions). So this looks strange.

What I love about DB2 is that the many autonomic features help forgetting that a database is running. The diagnostic file has information about how DB2 was/is doing. Using diaglevel I can set the "noise level" I prefer, the default (3) is to log all errors and warnings. If you set it to the highest level (most noise), it gives you all kind of informational messages. Did you know that you can analyze the diagnostic messages using the tool db2diag? It was introduced in DB2 a couple years ago. If you haven't done so, try it out and look at the "noise"...