New performance and security feature in Db2: Authentication cache

New security feature in Db2

The recent release of Db2 11.5.3 (Db2 V11.5 Mod Pack 3) includes a small gem that impacts both performance and security. It is a cache for User ID and Password-based authentication. That feature is great when your system uses LDAP / Active Directory for authentication because lookup results can be cached by Db2. By default, that feature is not active and you need to configure it. In this post, I am going to discuss how to enable and configure it.

Use Chromium-based browsers to manage FIDO security keys

Add fingerprint to FIDO key

Recently, I made a discovery that simplified how I manage my FIDO security keys. Instead of using a vendor tool to set a PIN or add fingerprints, I now switched to utilizing a Chrome- / Chromium-based browser for the administration. This works well on my Linux box. In this blog post, I am going to detail some of the features available.

Some advanced SQL to analyze COVID-19 data

Learn to write SQL

All of us are impacted by COVID-19. Looking at daily case numbers, the basic reproduction number or mortality rates has become a routine. But what is behind those numbers? How are they computed and how does SQL help? In this post, I want to discuss how some SQL analytics clauses help to dig through the data. When I teach database systems, I always try to show how it applies to life. Here, SQL may not directly help to cure the disease, but SQL is essential to compute and understand the statistics.

IBM Watson Studio: Download pandas DataFrame as CSV or Excel file

Gist code snippet

Right now, I am working with IBM Watson Studio on some analytics side project. It is nice to work with Jupyter Notebooks, Python and pandas and data again. Even Db2 is involved.

From working with pandas DataFrames locally, I knew how to turn the data into CSV or Excel files. But working with a hosted environment, accessing the file system is not possible and some other solution is needed.