4 ms·

Pure numbers aren't the important thing here, IMO. How many college students are playing with DB2 or IMS on System Z? It's going to be a very low number, for a

• acangiano 17y ago
  There is actually a great number of college students playing with DB2. They usually do so with DB2 Express-C, because it's free and production ready, so it's ideal for students and startups (even though we have large corporations who use it as well). DB2 Express-C is easy to work with, easy to administer, and has the same core code as commercial versions used by the largest companies in the world. System Z provides a nice hardware/software combo, but don't be fooled into thinking that DB2 LUW (Linux/Unix/Windows) is not "serious" or anything but great, really. DB2 provides many useful innovations that are not available to Oracle users. And thanks to DB2 Express-C, many of these benefits are available for free. DISCLAIMER: I work for IBM in the DB2 team.
  • sharms 17y ago
    This sounds suspiciously like marketing speak. I graduated in 2006, and we never even spoke of DB2 in my time at the University of Michigan. For curiosities sake, specifically to your post: What makes it ideal to startups (any cool examples)? What innovations exist in DB2 that are not available elsewhere?
    • abossy 17y ago
      From acangiano's profile: "I'm a Software Engineer & Technical Evangelist at IBM in Toronto, Canada."
      • 9oliYQjP 17y ago
        College in Canada has a different meaning than in the U.S.. Here, it means community college. The equivalent term in Canada for an American college would be university. In Canada there are no universities that I'm aware of that have DB2 on their curriculum. There are definitely community colleges that do have it though.
    • acangiano 17y ago
      > This sounds suspiciously like marketing speak. As some of you here may know, I'm a technical evangelist for IBM. I try to remain factual, but I may occasionally be a tad biased. I disclose my (IBM) affiliation in my profile, but edited my comment and added a disclaimer there as well. > I graduated in 2006, and we never even spoke of DB2 in my time at the University of Michigan. We have a "DB2 on Campus" initiative (started in July 2006) [1] that has spread to over 250 universities worldwide so far, with about 30,000 students and teachers participating in the program. > What makes it ideal to startups (any cool examples)? What innovations exist in DB2 that are not available elsewhere? Unlike different "express" editions provided by other vendors, DB2 Express-C doesn't impose limits on the size of the database, the number of users that can be connected, and so on. This means that a startup can begin using DB2 Express-C for free, while taking advantage of a fast, secure, rock solid, very scalable database that's already being used by large corporations for mission critical work. If you were to hit the jackpot and become highly successful, DB2 would be able to scale with you from your VPS box all the way to a cluster of instances running in parallel within a huge cloud environment. The free edition will use up to 2 CPU cores, and 2 GB of RAM, regardless of the hardware installed on your server. This is usually plenty, if you consider that many smaller startups don't even have a dedicated database VPS with 2 GB of RAM. For less than three grand a year, you can also obtain 24/7 technical support from IBM as well as the ability to access further features, like the possibility of setting up a fail over server through the so-called "High Availability and Disaster Recovery" (HADR) feature. This upgrade also enables DB2 to use 4 CPU cores, and up to 4 GB of RAM. IBM directly implements and supports APIs for various languages, including PHP, Ruby, and more recently Python. When you have an issue with any of those, you have people accountable for, and well paid to solve your problems. If you are wondering, those are open source, too, in case you like doing things DYI style. And we offer advanced tools like IBM Data Studio, free of charge as well. [2] Learning DB2 is fairly straightforward, and there is a great deal of free information. Amongst which you'll find a course that was extracted from the DB2 on Campus program [3] and free ebooks [4]. Regarding features, DB2 introduced something called pureXML. This allows you to natively store huge quantities of XML data and query it through SQL/XML, XPath, XQuery. It's amazingly fast. [5] The autonomic features of DB2 are also unmatched, enabling DB2 to self-tune itself, while limiting the amount of work required to administer and optimize DB2. There are also more "enterprisey" features like DPF, very advanced compression capabilities, pureQuery, InfoSphere Warehouse powered by DB2, and so on. But these are typically of less interest to early stage startups. 1. http://www.ibm.com/software/data/db2/express/students_programs.html http://www.ibm.com/software/data/db2/express/students_progra... 2. https://www14.software.ibm.com/webapp/iwm/web/preLogin.do?source=swg-idssa https://www14.software.ibm.com/webapp/iwm/web/preLogin.do?so... 3. http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/wikis/display/DB2/DB2+on+Campus+videos http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/wikis/display/DB2/DB2+on+C... 4. http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/wikis/display/DB2/FREE+Book-+Getting+Started+with+DB2+Express-C http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/wikis/display/DB2/FREE+Boo... 5. http://antoniocangiano.com/2008/11/04/benchmarking-db2-purexml-against-1-tb-of-xml-data/ http://antoniocangiano.com/2008/11/04/benchmarking-db2-purex...
  • hga 17y ago
    DB2 LUW is serious and great (or it was in the mid-late '90s, and a heck of a lot less painful to set up and administer than Oracle), but isn't mainframe DB2 a different code base with a variety of differences and quirks? And how many people know how to do System Z administration or applications programming?
    • derwiki 17y ago
      System Z DB2 is written in a completely different language than Express-C. I'm not sure there's even code overlap.