Keeping track of "my" DB2

Some years back when talking about DB2, there was only the "I am on the host" or "We are mostly OLTP" distinction. My standard phrase has been "I am a distributed guy". Well, today, when only talking about DB2 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows ("DB2 LUW"), some more description is needed to clearly state what, where, and how the product is used. Here is a small overview of my world of DB2 LUW.

• The regular, well-known DB2 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows that can be used on your laptop or your cluster of high-end servers in your data center ("on premise" or "on-prem") is available in seven different editions. Depending on the edition it features database encryption, highly efficient data compression, scalability for OLTP and analytic workloads (and others :), BLU Acceleration technology, federation support, and much more. Currently, DB2 is at version 10.5 with fix pack 6 being out since a week.
• If you are interested in using the Advanced Workgroup Server Edition or other editions of DB2 and don't want to deal with setup and maintenance, you could use the DB2 on Cloud service offered on IBM Bluemix (more cloud-based hosting options for DB2 are described in this overview).
• A fully provisioned version of DB2 is available as so-called SQLDB service on Bluemix. It helps you get started in no time and serves as relational data store for your apps on Bluemix.
• When it comes to cloud-based data warehousing and analytics, dashDB is the way to go. Its technology is based on DB2 with BLU Acceleration and Netezza. dashDB shares a lot of DB2, but not the Knowledge Center which dashDB has on its own... dashDB can be provisioned either through IBM Bluemix or through the NoSQL database Cloudant.
• The query language SQL is popular for accessing the data dumped into the Big Data lake/pond/reservoir/swamp. The IBM product BigInsights to manage and process Big Data features Big SQL for that task and is making use of DB2's proven technology. And as before, you can use BigInsights on Bluemix.

If you have not done so, I would recommend taking a look at the IBM Data Server Manager as fairly new tool to monitor, administrate, and tune DB2. The experience in using the web-based GUI can directly be applied to the administration interfaces of the related DB2 services in the cloud, sqldb and dashDB.

Wired or weird Tweets? Doesn't matter to Bluemix, DB2, and Node-RED...

Robot with
a personality?

Someone to talk to, someone to take the meeting minutes. Well, I can offer that - at least partially. I took the Node-RED service on Bluemix for a test drive and
created a Twitter service. It automatically can respond to tweets and can also store the incoming messages in a DB2 table. In my example it is just a, more or less, silly service right now, but it could be expanded to react to and log Twitter-based customer feedback, provide some basic interim reaction or acknowledgement. Let me show you how easy it is to get started...

To build the Twitter service you need the "Node-RED Starter" boilerplate from the Bluemix catalog as well as the "SQL Database" service. Create the Node-RED boilerplate first, then add the database service and directly bind it to the new application. Once everything has been provisioned, it is time for wiring up the Twitter service in the flow editor. The following picture gives an overview of the two flows when completed. I made the flows available in the Node-RED library.