Happy Holidays

Just a brief posting today to wish everyone a very happy holiday season.I am taking some down time thru the end of the year to visit family "up North."So, until next year, may your databases run without a glitch and here's hoping you all have an enjoyable holid...

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Quick Thoughts on DB2 Performance

Database performance problems are not caused by magic. Indeed, all performance problems are always caused by change. That statement flies in the face of what I normally say, which is “Almost never say always or never”… but in this case, it is true.Think about it for a moment. If everything remains stable and unchanging in your environment, then why would performance vary? That’s right, it wouldn’t.Something tangible must change before a performance problem can be experienced. The challenge of performance tuning is to find the source of the change,...

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A Short History of DB2 for z/OS – Part 2

Today’s blog entry is a continuation of yesterday’s post in which we began a brief review of the history of DB2 for z/OS. That post covered Versions 1 through 3; so today we pick up our historical review with Version 4.Version 4 was a very significant milestone in the history of DB2. It was highlighted by the introduction of Type 2 indexes, which removed the need to lock index pages (or subpages, now obsolete). Prior to V4, index locking was a particularly thorny performance problem that vexed many shops. And, of course, I’d be remiss if I did...

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A Short History of DB2 for z/OS – Part 1

Let's go back in time... almost three decades ago... back to the wild and woolly 1980s! And watch our favorite DBMS, DB2, grow up over time.Version 1 Release 1 was announced on June 7, 1983. And it became generally available on Tuesday, April 2, 1985. I wonder if it was ready on April 1st but not released because of April Fool’s Day? Any old-time IBMer out there care to comment?Initial DB2 development focused on the basics of making a relational DBMS work. Early releases of DB2 were viewed by many as an “information center” DBMS, not for production...

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Wordle of my DB2 Portal Blog

The "jumble" of words shown here is a Wordle, which is a "word cloud" of text. I fed my blog location into the Wordle generator and it created this pretty picture based on the words I most commonly use here in this blog.The cloud gives greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. No surprise that "DB2" and "data" dominate the other wor...

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