IDUG NA 2010, Days Two and Three

I’ve been running around kinda busy the past couple of days here at IDUG in Tampa, so I got a bit behind in blogging about the conference. So, today I’m combining two days of thoughts into one blog post.

(For a summary of IDUG Day One, click here.)

I started off day two by attending Brent Gross’ presentation on extracting the most value from .NET and ODBC applications. Brent discussed some of the things to be aware of when developing with .NET, an important “thing” being awareness that .NET is designed to work in a disconnected data architecture. So applications will not go through data a row at a time but instead send the data to the application and let it process it there. As an old mainframe DBA that caused alarm bells to ring.

I also got the opportunity to hear Dave Beulke discuss Java DB2 developer performance best practices. Dave delivered a lot of quality information, including the importance of developing quality code because Java developers reuse code – and you don’t want bad code being reused everywhere, right?

Dave started out mentioning how Java programmer are usually very young and do not have a lot of database experience. So DBAs need to get some Java knowledge and work closely with Java developers to ensure proper development. He also emphasized the importance of understanding the object to relational mapping method.

From a performance perspective Dave noted the importance of understanding the distributed calls (how many, where located, and bandwidth issues), controlling commit scope, and making sure your servers have sufficient memory. He also indicated that it is important to be able to track how many times Java programs connect to the database. He suggested using a server connection pool and to be sure that threads are always timed out after a certain period of time.

And I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that Dave promoted the use of pureQuery, which can be used to turn dynamic JDBC into static requests. Using pureQuery can improve performance (perhaps as much as 25 percent), as well as simplifying debugging & maintenance.

Dave also discussed how Hibernate can cause performance problems. Which brings me to the first session I attended on day three, John Mallonee’s session titled Wake Up to Hibernate. Hibernate is a persistent layer that maps Java objects to relational tables. It provides an abstraction layer between DB2 and your program. And it can also be thought of as a code generator. Hibernate plugs into popular IDEs, such as Eclipse and Rational tools. It is open source, and part of JBoss Enterprise Middleware (JBoss is a division of Red Hat).

John walked attendees through Hibernate, discussing the Java API for persistence, its query capabilities (including HQL, or Hibernate Query Language), and configuration issues. Examples of things that are configurable include JDBC driver, connection URL, user name, DataSource, connection pool settings, SQL controls (logging, log formatting), and the mapping file location.

HQL abstracts SQL. It is supposed to simplify query coding, but from what I saw of it in the session, I am dubious. John warned, too, that when HQL is turned into SQL the SQL won’t necessarily look the way you are used to seeing it. He recommended to setup the configuration file such that it formats the generated SQL or it won’t be very readable. John noted that one good thing about HQL is that you cannot easily write code with literals in them; it forces you to use parameter markers.

OK, so why can Hibernate be problematic? John talked about four primary concerns:

1. SQL is obscured
2. performance can be bad with generated code
3. Hibernate does not immediately support new DB2 features
4. Learning curve can be high

But he also noted that as you learn more about these problems -- and how Hibernate works -- that things tend to improve. Finally (at least with regard to Hibernate) John recommends that you should consider using HQL for simple queries, native SQL for advanced queries, for special situations use JDBC, and to achieve the highest performance use native DB2 SQL (e.g. stored procedure).

I also attended two presentations on the DB2 for z/OS optimizer. Terry Purcell gave his usual standout performance on optimization techniques. I particularly enjoyed his advice on what to say when someone asks why the optimizer chose a particular path: “Because it thinks that is the lowest cost access path.” After all, the DB2 optimizer is a cost-based optimizer. So if it didn’t choose the “best” path then chances are you need to provide the optimizer with better statistics.

And Suresh Sane did a nice job in his presentation in discussing the optimization process and walking thru several case studies.

All-in-all, it has been a very productive IDUG conference… but then again, I didn’t expect it to be anything else! Tomorrow morning I deliver my presentation titled “The Return of the DB2 Top Ten Lists.” Many of you have seen my original DB2 top ten lists presentation, but this one is a brand new selection of top ten lists… and I’m looking forward to delivering it for the first time at IDUG…