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...?