Monday, April 11, 2016

The Most Misunderstood Features of DB2 - Part 8: Do I have to pick just one?

There are so many misunderstood and misused aspects of DB2 for z/OS that it would be hard to choose only one. This series of blog posts, which concludes today with this one, has covered a wide variety of topics over 7 installments. So it would seem that there is no lack of misunderstanding out there!

So, if I had to pick just one thing as the most misunderstood thing, I think I’m going to have to cheat and say that the biggest problem in DB2-land is an overall pervasive lack of knowledge of what DB2 can do. Who among us can really say that we know everything there is to know about every last feature and function that our favorite DBMS supports?

Now don’t get me wrong? I am not trying to indict the technicians using DB2. Richard Saul Wurman wrote a book called Information Anxiety that details what I think many of us are feeling, which is a general uneasiness at being overwhelmed with a large amount of facts, figures and data that can be hard to master.

This situation has come about because DBMSs are becoming large and unwieldy as they adopt functionality that previously was performed outside of the database environment. This is certainly that case with DB2 for z/OS which has adding a lot of new SQL functionality, new types of table spaces, temporal support, IDAA, and on and on and on in just the past few releases. There is simply too much functionality in DB2 for anyone to be an expert on all of it (well, with this possible exception of some of those IBM developers).

If you’ve missed any of the previous posts in this series, here are links to each of the 7 prior installments in this series:


                    
And now, with all of these misunderstandings out of the way, maybe we can focus on more understanding in upcoming blog posts!

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