Friday, March 23, 2007

IBM Annual Report: Good News for DB2 DBAs

I sometimes enjoy reading through the annual reports of companies like IBM (that is, companies whose products I use "on the job"), so I thought maybe readers of my blog might enjoy that, too. With that in mind, IBM's annual report for 2006 is now up and available online.

What nuggets of information did I find in it? Well, I have to admit, I have not scoured it from front to back (and I probably won't), but I did try to track down the status of DB2 within the company. DB2 falls within IBM's Information Management brand, in their Middleware software segment. The annual report tells me that the Middleware software segment is doing better than the overall software category within IBM:
  • The Middleware segment grew to $13.891 billion in 2006 from $12.552 billion in 2005. And that represents year over year growth of 10.7%.
  • IBM's entire software portfolio posted revenue of $18.161 in 2006 versus $16.83 billion in 2005, representing a year over year growth of 7.9%.
OK, but what about DB2? The best I can do is all of Information Management, which include DB2, as well as IMS and Informix, and all of the data management tools that IBM sells. These products posted a 14% gain in 2006 over 2005. Nice...

In terms of hardware, though, IBM saw a slide in that market segment. The company posted revenue of $21.97 billion in 2006 down from the $23.857 billion posted in 2005. This is a 7.9% drop in annual revenue for hardware. But, you may well ask, we care about the mainframe more than those other platforms, how did it do?

It did well, my friends. Of the four major computer brands sold by IBM, the z series boxes (that is, the mainframes) did the best. System z was up 7.8% over 2005. Its closest competitor was System x (UNIX servers) which was up 3.7%. Bad news for the other two computing platforms: System i (that is, the AS/400s) was down 15% and System p (Windows servers) was down 1.1%.

So, if you are my kinda people - that is, DBAs working on DB2 for z/OS - then IBM's annual report contains good news all around. The DBMS business is healthy and so is the mainframe business.

Monday, March 19, 2007

DB2 for z/OS V8 Performance Workshops

Just a quick note this morning to let folks in Zurich, Switzerland and London, UK know about a three-day performance workshop for DB2 V8 coming up in June. The workshop is based on the IBM Redbook DB2 for z/OS Version 8 Performance Topics, SG24-6465. If you are looking for an overview and update of performance-related issues you can tackle with DB2 V8, consider this workshop. According to the redbook web site this workshop helps "you understand the performance implications of migrating from DB2 V7 to DB2 V8, highlights the key performance functions and sets the right expectations. It provides the type of information needed to evaluate the performance impact of DB2 V8 and the capacity planning needs."

Of course, this workshop information is directed mostly at my European readers... unless, of course, you are a USA reader with some extra travel budget and your manager will allow you to travel overseas!?!? (I know, I know, you can't even get budget to travel to Scranton, let alone Zurich...)

Here is the information for each:
That's all for today!

Wednesday, March 14, 2007

IDUG News

A lot of new stuff has been going on at the International DB2 User's Group (IDUG) the past few months, so I thought I'd write a quick blog entry to update folks about what's new.

First of all, this year's North American IDUG conference will be held the week of May 6 thru 10, 2007, in San Jose, CA. As always, the conference offers a fantastic learning and networking opportunity for DB2 and Informix users with hundreds of technical sessions, as well as 16 full day pre-conference seminars, the opprotunity to take certification exams for free, numerous special interest groups, and a great vendor exhibition. Also, this year's event is the first to offer IMS content, too - so if you are an IMS DBA or technician now is the time to add IDUG to your educational opportunities!

In other IDUG news, the group is expanding its conference coverage to India. The 2007 IDUG India Forum, taking place May 31 – June 2, 2007 in Bangalore, India, is geared towards professional application developers and DBAs. This three-day event will present content that will appeal to new users as well as experienced professionals. So if you are in India, IDUG is coming your way!

Finally, if you haven't visited the IDUG web site in awhile, now is the time to check it out again. IDUG volunteers have put a lot of effort into revamping the site and it looks great.

That's it for now... check in again soon!

Tuesday, March 06, 2007

DB2 9 for z/OS General Availability Announced

Today, March 6, 2007, IBM announced the general availability of the next version of DB2 for z/OS, DB2 9, for March 16, 2007. The full announcement can be read here.

You can read a high-level overview of DB2 9 for z/OS in my DB2 Magazine article titled DB2 9 for z/OS Roars to Life.

Wednesday, February 28, 2007

QMF vs. SPUFI

As regular readers of my blog know, I sometimes use the blog to answer questions I get via e-mail. This is one of those times...

The question I received is this:
Can you bring out the major differences between QMF and SPUFI?

Here is my response:
The biggest difference between QMF and SPUFI is that QMF is a query/reporting environment with the ability to format reports. SPUFI is just a quick and dirty SQL execution engine.

(Here is a trivia question: what does the acronym SPUFI stand for? The answer is provided at the bottom, so page down if you want to know...)

If you need to produce nice-looking reports, enable user input to a query, or store your queries and reports for future usage, QMF is a much better technology for doing so. QMF also offers data formatting and translation capabilities that are difficult (sometimes impossible) to accomplish using SPUFI and SQL alone.

A typical end-user might have difficulty using SPUFI because it requires using data sets to store your SQL statements and pass them to DB2. The results are also delivered to another data set. Most end users are not comfortable managing and manipulating mainframe data sets. QMF, on the other hand, stores its queries in tables and hides this fact from the user with a nice interface for saving and recalling SQL queries (and results).

Keep in mind, though, that SPUFI comes for free with DB2 whereas QMF is an add-on product and costs money. Not every DB2 customer will have QMF, whereas every DB2 (mainframe) customer will have SPUFI.



OK, now, what does SPUFI stand for?

The answer: SQL Processor Using File Input.