BigDataOnCloud + FreeDB2 » Programming

Hadoop Programming Challenge Extended by a Week

Leon Katsnelson — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 15:39:10 +0000

I blogged about Hadoop Programming Challenge on Big Data University and an opportunity to not only get free Hadoop education but also an all expenses paid trip to Las Vegas. We have had 1400 students take the required Hadoop Fundamentals course. And we have been genuinely impressed with both what many of the students have been able to learn and the creativity of some of the Hadoop Programming Contest submissions. The submissions range from analysis of global warming, to dealing with terror threats to analysis of bra cup sizes. We are not passing judgement on the value of the solution [...]

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Top 3 ways to return TOP 10 rows by an SQL query

Leon Katsnelson — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 14:01:03 +0000

Limiting amount of data returned by a database to an application is probably the easiest and the most effective way to improve performance your application. DB2 provides 3 ways of accomplishing this. You can use DB2 SQL FETCH FIRST n ROWS syntax. You can use SQL syntax of another DBMS like MySQL, Oracle or Sybase, or you can do this in a database independent way by using the capabilities provided by the database API you are using in your application code. [...]

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Let DB2 tell you where to go and what to do there

Leon Katsnelson — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 18:28:56 +0000

Last week I blogged about the rise in importance of location-based data. The timing was not a coincidence. I am a bit of a gadget freak and last week was a pretty important event in the world of gadgets and technology in general. For the first time ever Apple, a company specializing in mobile devices, became the largest technology company in the world, edging out Microsoft, a traditional computing company. Because pretty much every mobile device today comes with ability to capture location data, I am convinced that we are entering a stage where location data will become ubiquitous.

Another reason [...]

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Has Apple gone too far in its attack on Adobe Flash?

Leon Katsnelson — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 23:28:17 +0000

I don’t speak for IBM and I don’t express opinions of IBM if there ever was such a thing. I spend the last 25 years in the IT industry and I have to say that I have rarely seen such blatant disregard for the freedom of choice as Apple has done in its now infamous Clause 3.3.1 of the Apple iPhone OS SDK License. It reads like this:

Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript [...]

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The Article every DBA should forward to SQL developers

Leon Katsnelson — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 18:41:08 +0000

I think that every Database Administrator needs to read the article “Opinion: No more excuses for SQL injection attacks” and send it out to every application developer they know. I hate SPAM as much as the next guy but I think it is justified in this case. I am dead serious. We, the database people of all walks of life (DB2, Oracle, SQL Server …), have been talking about the benefits of using parameters in the queries instead of literal values for years. The main message has been “performance”. Most DBMS will perform much better and will use less server [...]

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New and improved DB2 support for Ruby on Rails

Leon Katsnelson — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 00:43:40 +0000

Our development team just released version 1.1.1 of the IBM_DB gem which provides support for using Ruby on Rails with DB2 and IDS. The new gem provides support for Activerecord 2.3.3 and a fix for a defect that will let us implement support for a popular Ruby on Rails application. [...]

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Fiserv moves to DB2 and .NET

Leon Katsnelson — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 05:50:12 +0000

66 Credit Unions are now running on Fiserv's new platform built on DB2 and .NET. [...]

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Everything you ever wanted to know about a DB2 table but did not know where to look

Leon Katsnelson — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 04:29:52 +0000

Since table objects (or just tables) are so fundamental to your ability to store and retrieve data there comes a time when you want to get some information on a particular table in your database. For example, you may want to know how much disk space has been allocated for a particular table, or what state it is in. Should it be reorganized? Has the last load job finished loading data in to it and so on. If you were using MySQL, you may have just looked at the file that represents a table and were able to figure out disk usage that way. There is a better way to do this in DB2 Express-C (and every other DB2 for Linux, Unix and Windows v9.5). Since DB2 speaks SQL, it makes sense to query information about its tables using SQL. DB2 provides not one but 2 ways of getting cornucopia of information about tables via SQL. One way is to use a SYSIBMADM.ADMINTABINFO view. [...]

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