Here's the second installment of the Top 10 of DB2 10 in 2010. Read on and I hope you enjoy.

My latest column is "THE DIGITAL PANDEMIC" - interesting new book describing our addiction to technology.

An Iterative Analogy

Standards should be obvious to those who have practiced the profession for a while and have experience. If you are the only one doing it then it's a personal preference, not a standard. Standards should be non-trivial and non-stupid.

DB2 10 is almost here. Since it's beta program has been announced, I thought doing a Top 10 of DB2 10 in 2010 would be the prefect them for a series of blogs. Starting today, I'll be looking at a couple of features being delivered in DB2 10 each day; my version of a DB2 10 Top 10.

I hereby declare Saturday, April 3, PostgreSQL Test-Fest day. Get our your computers and get ready to test Version 9.

The Informatica 10K filing to the stock exchange reveals they settled a patent dispute for ETL patent infringement for $4.3 that covers all past and future infringement.

I have just finished up a terrific week in Amsterdam. It was a little cold by Houston standards and a little damp, but the mainframe event I attended, put on by IBM Holland, was terrific. From all of the customers I had the chance to talk with, I was not alone in my opinion of how successful an event this was.

Tonight for a project I was working on I realized I could simplify my PL/pgSQL code a lot if I had functions which would take a list of dates and give me the first or the last date chronologically. Then I found out, thanks to VARIADIC and a new built-in, how easy that is in PostgreSQL 8.4.2:

From An Expert's Guide to Oracle Technology March 1-7 is National Procrastination Week (NPW). Happy NPW! I meant to write about it last week. But I was celebrating it instead. ;-) LewisC

Don't get lost in the mix or mired in the details

Yup, batch. The stuff that has been around on the mainframe a lot longer than I have. It's the process many of us love to hate and it seems to fit the old adage "can't live with it, can't live without it". So, here's my question.

Well, it's Friday and continuing on with my latest tradition, it's once again time to publish Kathy's guest blog post covering the latest and greatest Optim news... Enjoy!!!!

I have been learning, in "crash course" mode", about creating CLR UDF's this last week. I have known for some time now that SQL can't do everything . . . even if it can do an awful lot of things. ;-) However, working with CLR languages (in my case, C#) and building UDF's or SP's, while on my list, was not at the top of my list of things to do . . . however, that changed

Yup, you read that correctly. It's never to early to start planning for your upgrade to the bigger and better DB2 for z/OS. There is another new release of DB2 on the horizon, DB2 10 for z/OS. With every new DB2 comes you migration/fallback PTFs; that stuff you apply to your existing system so everyone plays well together.

The silence is deafening

I would have named it the DB Horcrux. Think about it.

Every time I visit the Qantas Club lounge in an Australian airport and switch on the wireless internet I get an IBM URL error.

Cleverbot is a Learning Artificial Intelligence AI software program that cannot learn how to use IBM InfoSphere DataStage. Cleverbot at www.cleverbot.com.  I put it through the DataStage Certification sample questions. User: Wh...

My latest column is "WHY WE RESIST PLANNING" - two answers, one long and one short.