50 Years of IBM Mainframe: The Art of Selling

IBM (and the world) are celebrating 50 years of mainframe, "Make the Extraordinary possible". To honor the mainframe, I want to point you to a series of IBM-produced videos from few years back. The series is labelled "THE MAINFRAME: The Art of the Sale", featuring real IBMers and lots of wisdom...

Lesson One:


Lesson Two:


Lesson Three:


Lesson Four:


Lesson Five:


Lesson Six:

XML or JSON: When to choose what for your database

There is a new article on IBM developerWorks titled "XML or JSON: Guidelines for what to choose for DB2 for z/OS". It has been written by two very experienced technologists with DB2 background. Though the comparison and the many code examples for how to use either XML or JSON are for DB2 for z/OS, most of it also applies to DB2 LUW. So I recommend reading the article regardless of which "camp" you are in.

At the end of the XML vs. JSON comparison is a resource section with a list of good papers and documentation. In my blog's page on DB2 & pureXML Resources you will also find additional material on that topic.

With that to read enjoy the weekend!

(DB2) Redbooks as eBooks (epub)

Do you like Redbooks, IBM's free technical publications, written by subject matter experts? Do you have an e-reader and like reading electronic books? The perfect combination of the two is to download the IBM Redbooks as electronic books in the EPUB format. It is supported on most e-readers and also can be converted to other formats.

As usual, the IBM Redbooks are free to download and free to use, but highly valuable. Here are some IBM Redbooks on DB2 which are available in the EPUB format:

• Unleashing DB2 10 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows 
• High Availability and Disaster Recovery Options for DB2 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows 
• DB2 Virtualization
• DB2 Workload Manager for Linux, UNIX, and Windows
• Oracle to DB2 Conversion Guide: Compatibility Made Easy
• MySQL to DB2 Conversion Guide
• IBM Optim Performance Manager for DB2 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows
• DB2 for z/OS Performance Topics 
• Security Functions of DB2 10 for z/OS 
• and several more by searching on the Redbooks page

My money, SEPA payments, DB2 z/OS, and pureXML

A new article about how DB2 pureXML is used to process SEPA payments has been published on IBM developerWorks. SEPA is the short for Single European Payment Area, an unification and simplification of cross-border payment processes within the European Union/Euro region and associated countries.

In the article Jane Man shows some tricks in handling documents, extracting information, and updating XML documents. Some of the problems they ran into are also discussed.

XML Devotee session with z/OS topics

A session of the so-called XML Devotee Community will be held this Wednesday, September 12th, with two topics: 1) Using COBOL with pureXML on DB2 z/OS and 2) XML processing on z/OS. Details of the session, including phone numbers, speaker info and more is available at the community website.

It is coming up, here is the video

Something about to happen...:

How to communicate within your family (kids, significant other, DB2)...

Healthy families talk with each other. But (usually) I speak differently with my wife than with my kids. There is no manual on how to address everyone individually or how to conduct get heard by all of them. Fortunately, there is a guide for the DB2 family of products. And it has been updated recently.

When I give talks about the DB2 family I always mention that we strive to coordinate new features, learn from each other (yes, even mistakes), and try to speak the same language. Time travel queries (temporal data), row and column access control, the XML data type, binary XML, etc. are some of the more visible recent coordinated endeavors. Now the so-called SQL Reference for Cross-Platform Development has been updated to reflect new DB2 features. That page is very useful for some other reasons:

• It offers links to older versions of the SQL Reference for Cross-Platform Development.
• It has links to a lot of documentation for DB2 z/OS, DB2 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows, and for DB2 i.
• All versions combined, it has 10 years of best practices of application development.

That's all for now, I have to go prepare the dinner table. Some family discussion is about to start...

Quick answer: Yes, there is DB2 LUW on the mainframe under zLinux

One of the harder Google and Bing searches is to find out whether DB2 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows (DB2 LUW) is supported on a Linux system running on the mainframe (System z). Often only references to DB2 for z/OS or DB2 on Linux are found. Anyway, to answer a question that I got, DB2 for Linux is supported on the so-called zLinux and it might come to a surprise that you can choose between DB2 for z/OS (with a deep system integration) or DB2 for the distributed platform.

IDAA: IBM DB2 Analytics Accelerator announced

As you might have guessed from the date of my last post, I have been busy - actually I still am - with bootcamps and customers. Thus, today it will only point you to the announcement of the IBM DB2 Analytics Accelerator for z/OS. It is labeled Version 2.1 because V1 was named the IBM Smart Analytics Optimizer which I wrote about last year. For more information read the announcement.

New Redbook: Security Functions of IBM DB2 10 for z/OS

A quick recommendation: Few days ago IBM published a new and very interesting Redbook titled "Security Functions of DB2 10 for z/OS". In the 450+ pages book the authors touch base and dig into all aspects of security, such as access control, cryptography, auditing and many more.

Redbook published: Extremely pureXML in DB2 10 for z/OS

Now the IBM Redbook "Extremely pureXML in DB2 10 for z/OS" has made its way to the public. On more than 300 pages it covers all important topics for XML data processing in DB2 on the mainframe.

World Economic Forum, Parking Problems, and DB2 pureXML

Image via Wikipedia

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...?

New generation of mainframes and an integrated accelerator for warehouse workloads

IBM today announced a new generation of its mainframe computers, labeled zEnterprise. Based on a hybrid architecture, zEnterprise BladeCenter Extensions (zBX), it allows to integrate and manage POWER7 blades or System x blades from within the mainframe infrastructure. (One of) the first to exploit the zBX feature is the IBM Smart Analytics Optimizer. The latter allows to significantly speed up analytic queries running on DB2 for z/OS. Queries that qualify a transparently routed to the accelerator and return in a fraction of the time.

A small step for mankind, but a good day for mainframe customer, especially those using DB2.

Housing Transactional and Data Warehouse Workloads on System z

While screening new Redbook titles and noticed an interesting new book currently in draft status. It is labeled Housing Transaction and Data Warehouse Workloads on System z. Remember that the IBM Smart Analytics System (ISAS) is no longer an offering only available to DB2 LUW customers, but with ISAS 9600 also an offering on for the Information Management community on System z.