Covid19 phone challenge: My old Nokia has Android now

My reliable Nokia phone

During these nasty times, you need a steady, reliable companion. It is my old Nokia phone (pictured). It takes phone calls, has an alarm and the current time. Moreover, it serves as projectile against all kinds of "obstacles". The only things missing are Db2 and a Linux terminal. Anyway, this was about to change. Today, I learned that finally (finally!) Android has arrived for this phone with the latest firmware upgrade.

Carnival: Even DB2 Wears a Mask (Database Security)

Data Privacy and Security

Right now we are in the hot phase of the carnival season. Many people are wearing masks. Some move into other characters, some just hide their real identity. Did you know that DB2 is also in the mood for carnival and wears a mask? Here is what my DB2 is doing these days...

New Bluemix Data Sink Service Tackles Data Overload

IBM today announced a new experimental service for its Bluemix cloud platform that provides Data Sink capabilities to its users, helping companies to tackle data overload scenarios, enhancing data archiving throughput and solving data retention issues. Building on the global network of SoftLayer data centers the new data sink as a service will feature triple redundancy for high performance and increased fault tolerance, and hence tentatively is named DSaaSTR (Data Sink-as-a-Service with Triple Redundancy).

Initially the experimental Bluemix service is free and allows to pipe up to 1 TB (one terabyte) of data a month to the data sink. Customers already on direct network links will be able to utilize the full network bandwith. This gives the opportunity to test the DSaaSTR offer for the following scenarios:

• The abundance of sensors and their generated data, whether in Internet of Things (IoT) or Industry 4.0 scenarios, leaves companies struggling with data storage. Utilizing the new service they can leverage the DSaaSTR in the cloud to get rid of local data.
• The more data and data storage options, the more intruders. By piping data to the Bluemix DSaaSTR it will become unavailable for attackers.
• Local data archives require active data management, enforcement of retention policies, and rigorous disposal. DSaaSTR offers easy choices for data retention and disposal.
• Many enterprises have learned that even Hadoop Clusters need actively managed storage. DSaaSTR can be configured to be part of a local or cloud-based Hadoop system (hybrid cloud), thus eliminating storage costs and simplifying the overall administration tasks for the cluster.

The new service is made available to select customers worldwide as part of the experimental Bluemix service catalog. If you are interested in signing up please send me an email or get in touch with your regular Bluemix seller or support contact.

Everybody hates DB2, and pureXML is crap!

DB2 pureXML has only one XML type, can you believe it? There are no choices. To be more flexible I want one XML type for financial applications, one for report-generating applications, one for financial applications that are used for generating reports, and one for report-generating applications in a more financial context. Where are my choices in DB2? Only one XML data type, no options!
DB2 pureXML is following those quasi standards from W3C for updating XML data. It's not standard yet. Can't they do anything proprietary that will stay proprietary after the standardisation is finished? I want something different in my database system, not standards. It would be too simple to learn and too simple to port to or from other systems. I want to show that I have special skills that I can use only with one special system. I hate DB2, I hate standards.
DB2 has all this autonomic and automatic stuff which is too simple to use. Where are the knobs? I love configurations, optimizer hints and month-long fine tuning, why autonomics? I don't want a life. Autonomics does not work. Look at the DB2 pureXML benchmark results! They did only use autonomics during their 1 TB TPoX benchmark, no manual tuning. Look at the pureXML results, the numbers cannot be good.
Speaking of benchmark results, I hate them. Why can't the DB2 guys leave testing to enterprises alone? Why do they make benchmark results public? We all know that benchmarks are crap and that's why so far no really serious database vendor has published any benchmark results, ever! This is all so much crap!

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Are you wondering whether I had too much coffee this morning or was trying substances used in professional "sports" or my wife made me sleep outside in the cold? Nice guess, but I am only testing something for the upcoming April Fools' Day. The above may have been a bit too obvious, may have been missing any "supportive" facts and links you may have asked for. I hope you enjoyed it nonetheless. If you are in for more subtleties you should try reading what Oracle lables "Oracle 11g XML DB vs. DB2 9.5 pureXML". It can be downloaded here. I enjoyed all the subtle humor and how they argue. Nice, a well done paper for April Fools' Day!

BTW: You can learn more about TPoX in one of my previous posts and of course at the official TPoX website. I also wrote about XML storage options before. If you have never touched DB2, I encourage you to try out DB2. Don't be fooled. DB2 Express-C can even be used in production systems free of charge and pureXML is included.