There is a discussion thread on LinkedIN IDUG NA group with a number of people chiming in about how many IDUG (International DB2 User Group) events they’ve participated in. Phil Granger thinks he has done 42. I have had my share of IDUG events but I don’t think I am going to beat Phil’s record. I did present at many IDUG events (well over 20 I think) and each one was a rewarding experience for me as both presenter but even more so as an attendee. I am always fascinated by the depth of the technical content that is exchanged [...]
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It is strange to be writing this post right after the biggest outage in the cloud computing history. Outage or not, I feel the march to the cloud is all but unstoppable. Not only is this outage not going to deter more people to come to the cloud, it will, in my humble opinion, accelerate cloud computing momentum. Even though the outage was confined to a single region of the Amazon EC2 cloud, it was, and still is, at the top of the news and the world at large can finally understand just how much workload has already moved to [...]
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Large scale cloud providers like Amazon Web Services, Google, IBM etc. have top notch systems, processes and people to deliver continuous availability. The capabilities and resources they bring forward are very hard to match by anyone even the largest enterprises. However, everything fails at one time or another. Case in point, Japanese nuclear reactors were designed to withstand some serious calamities yet the they still failed in the most spectacular fashion adding to the misery of an already devastated population. Japanese people need our help; please donate if you can. Cloud computing vendors are not immune to failure. And while [...] Read ...
A couple of weeks ago we released Alpha 4 of the next version of DB2 without much fanfare, pump or ceremony. Why so quietly? Is there no interesting new functionality that IBM would want to know about? is the quality not there yet? Not at all. The upcoming version of DB2 is bristling with some really cool functions and despite the “Alpha” designation the code seems to be very stable. [...]
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There is a really interesting discussion going on the IDUG’s DB2 List that started with a simple question: I’m wondering, if you had a person turn up at your desk and say … “How do I get a job in the DB2 DBA / SYSPROG for z/Os world?” … what would you do? Put them off? Encourage them? Suggest they re-train as an Investment Banker  ? etc DB2 list is a favorite hang out place for DB2 for z/OS DBAs and system programmers. While the question is specific to mainframe jobs, I think it applies to other DBAs and even to IT careers overall. The IT as a career choice has lost a lot of its shine. Universities across United States, Canada and western Europe report significant drop in enrolments in computer science programmes. Much of the blame, rightly or wrongly, is directed at outsourcing. [...]
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