Free Webinar - Database Auditing for DB2 z/OS - July 29, 2008

Protecting corporate data is a requirement of doing business in today's regulatory and security-minded business environment. Protecting corporate data -- an especially sensitive data -- is a matter of knowing who is accessing data and what are they doing with it. There have been many solutions for addressing this need on distributed databases, but no reasonable solution for protecting mainframe data until now.

Learn all about an exciting new solution for auditing your DB2 for z/OS databases and resources - Guardium for Mainframes - at this free webinar on July 29, 2008.

Guardium for Mainframes provides 100% visibility into mainframe database activities without impacting normal business operations. This webinar will show you how to get better insight into database activity without the performance penalty of typical database trace utilities and without relying on inadequate log file data.

I'll be introducing the webinar and giving a quick overview of the issues, and Bill Baker, a senior software consultant with NEON Enterprise Software, will walk through a demonstration of the Guardium for Mainframes in action!

New Data Sharing RedPaper

Just a quick FYI today to let you know about a new RedPaper offering information about exploiting client load balancing and fail over capabilities across a DB2 data sharing group (or a subset of the group members).

A RedPaper is sort of like a tip, only longer... and sort of like a RedBook, only shorter... Anyway, if you are interested in the topic, the RedPaper can be donwloaded for free by following this link:

DB2 9 for z/OS Data Sharing: Distributed Load Balancing and Fault Tolerant Configuration

A Video Interview on Long-term Retention

When I spoke at the Techxans event in Houston this past May (2008) I was interviewed beforehand on what my presentation would cover. And lo' and behold, the Techxans folks have put that interview up on YouTube, so I thought I'd share it here with my regular blog readers. Enjoy!

No Alphabetic Characters Wanted

Here is a question that was posed to me recently:

Q: We have a CHAR(10) column that cannot contain alphabetic characters. How can we make sure that the letters A thru Z are not allowed.

A: Well, think about the characteristics of alphabetic characters versus the other "things" that can be stored in a CHAR column. One thing that separates an alphabetic letter from numbers, punctuation, etc. is that there are upper and lower case versions (e.g. A, a). So, you could use the following predicate to preclude alphabetic characters from being accepted:

LOWER(:string) = UPPER(:string)

Of course, you will not be able to put this into a CHECK constraint because of restrictions on their content (for example, you cannot use function in a CHECK constraint). But you could use this in SQL statements and as a check in your programs before allowing data to be inserted or modified in your CHAR(10) column.

Anyone else have any other ideas?

IBM Rules the Middleware Roost

Have you seen Gartner's latest report on the middleware market?

The Gartner middleware market numbers were reported in a recent article in eWeek. Evidently, the worldwide application infrastructure and middleware software market revenue totaled $14.1 billion in 2007, a 12.9 percent increase from 2006 revenue of $12.5 billion.

Now that is quite healthy growth in what is a somewhat slow market. And right there at the top of the pile is IBM with a 28.9 percent share of what Gartner identifies as the AIM market...BEA Systems came in second with 9.3 percent of the market, followed by Oracle with 8.5 percent. However, Oracle now owns BEA and will benefit from BEA's market share (next year).

Oracle will likely continue its acquisitive ways, but IBM has not been silent on the acquisition front lately either. So I'm guessing that next year IBM will retain its #1 position with Oracle coming in solidly at #2.

For 2007, though, in terms of growth, Microsoft and Software AG posted impressive gains. Among the big enterprise software vendors, Microsoft came in at 41.6 percent revenue growth year over year. And Software AG showed strong growth with a 107 percent increase from 2006.

This is a market segment, like database software, where a small number of big players own most of the market. However, it is not quite as monopolized as the database market where three players (IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft) dwarf the rest of the field. The top five middleware vendors hold over 50 percent of the overall market and Gartner indicates that the big players are slowly eroding market share from the smaller vendors.