DB2 support for Django is coming

This article is obsolete. Please refer to the following articles for up do date instructions: Ruby/Rails and DB2 | Python/Django and DB2. Thank you! Online Surveys & Market Research A few weeks after DB2 Express-C for Mac OS X was announced, I’m here to let you in on another great scoop. DB2 support for the Django web framework is going to be available soon to the community, under the...

Install DB2 on Mac OS X and give us feedback

A little over a week ago IBM released a new version of the DB2 beta for Mac OS X Leopard, following up on valuable feedback that we’d received in response to earlier versions. This version is important because it resolves a reported issue that was occurring when building drivers for languages like Ruby and PHP. Hence, I highly encourage you to download the latest DB2 for Mac now and save yourself the hassle of...

DB2 on Mac officially released

As pre-announced in my two previous posts, DB2 for Mac OS X Leopard is finally available for download. It’s now official, DB2 on Mac is here. Reflections on DB2 on Mac Several people, including myself, would happily ditch their virtual machines and start introducing DB2 into their native Mac development stacks. But this milestone represents much more than the immediate implications would have us believe. A few...

Download DB2 on Mac

I’m glad to announce that DB2 Express-C 9.5.2 for Mac OS X Leopard is available for download. Later tonight, I will provide further details. Meanwhile, enjoy!

DB2 on Mac to ship before Christmas

This is not an official announcement, but I must share the news with you. DB2 Express-C for Mac OS X Leopard will finally be shipping out (before Christmas), in all likelihood it could be as soon as early next week. You may recall how more than a year ago I blogged about how the work on porting DB2 to the Mac had started. It took admittedly longer than expected but DB2 on Mac is coming, and is absolutely free of...

IBM’s XML Challenge (lots of prizes inside)

IBM is holding a series of challenges centered around XML. The whole event is labeled The XML Challenge (subtitle: Search for the XML superstar). Rockstar references aside, this is a pretty cool initiative that can provide you with some freebies as well as high quality prizes if you win any of the available contests. The Contests What I say below applies to US and Canada, as the contest is being held worldwide in...

Resolving the gray window when running db2setup

You drank the Kool-Aid and downloaded the awesomeness which is DB2 Express-C. Good job! Next you proceed to install it on Linux with sudo ./db2setup and boom, instead of a launchpad all you see is a gray window. Now what? This problem is a known Java bug (resolved in Java 6) that shows up on Linux distros where Compiz effects are enabled. For example, this problem manifests itself in recent Ubuntu releases,...

And the winner is…

A few days ago I announced that I was going to give away a free ticket for the first Professional Ruby Conference, organized by Obie Fernandez and Addison-Wesley, to one of my readers. Each person who took the survey, received a discount code for the conference valued at $200. More excitingly, every eligible participant in the survey was added to a draw for a free ticket. Many replies came in, but of them only 30...

Benchmarking DB2 pureXML against 1 TB of XML data

Once upon a time there was a Ruby library called Hpricot. Well it’s still here in fact. This library is the de facto standard for parsing HTML in Ruby, and is often used to parse XML as well. Hpricot is normally considered to be quite fast, as far as Ruby libraries go. Yet Nokogiri recently garnered some buzz thanks to a microbenchmark that emphasized its speed over Hpricot’s, when it comes to parsing...

Ruby on Rails at IOD 2008

IBM’s Information on Demand 2008 kicks off in a few days. If you intend on participating, don’t forget to enroll now. For those of you who’ll be attending the event in Las Vegas, I recommend that you schedule in time to check out the session “Putting DB2 on Rails”. This session will be presented by my manager, Leon Katsnelson and my colleague Bradley Steinfeld, and will outline the...

A close look at three Rails 2.1 bugs

Ruby on Rails 2.1 has been out for six weeks now. Let’s take a closer look at three database related bugs that affect this release. 1. SQLite’s db creation generates false warnings This is an innocuous bug, and if you work with SQLite I’m sure that you encountered and safely ignored it. When you create a Rails application, the default adapter in use is sqlite3, unless you specify otherwise with the...

IBM’s crazy DB2 videos. What do you think?

IBM is clearly synonymous with the term “Enterprise”, but I can testify that working here means interacting with many cool, down to earth people who are passionate about their profession. They are not the “corporate drones” that you’d expect. I sometimes think that there is a divide between the image of IBM and the reality of a company that’s mostly comprised of young people...

Is the Enterprise world Rails ready?

When searching the web for the words “Rails” and “Enterprise” you’ll find countless discussions about whether Rails is Enterprise ready. Some argue that it is, especially thanks to the extendibility offered by its plugin support, while others claim that realistically it’s not. “Is Rails Enterprise ready?” is the wrong question, I’d rather ask if the Enterprise...

On Rails and DB2

James Governor wrote an interesting post entitled “On douchebags, DB2 and Rails: DHH not pragmatic enough?”. It’s partially in response to Jeff Atwood’s article “Douchebaggery” which, in turn is a reply to an old post by David Heinemeier Hansson. So please excuse me if I limit the entertainment value of this post by not calling anyone names. Amongst a few sensible comments,...

IBM releases DB2 adapter for SQLAlchemy

This article is obsolete. Please refer to the following articles for up do date instructions: Ruby/Rails and DB2 | Python/Django and DB2. Thank you! A while ago I informally announced IBM’s intention to develop an SQLAlchemy adapter for DB2 and Informix IDS. Today, I’m happy to inform you that we have a first working release for DB2 on Linux, Unix and Windows (LUW). Support for Informix IDS is next...

Essential guide to the Ruby driver for DB2

This article is obsolete. Please refer to the following articles for up do date instructions: Ruby/Rails and DB2 | Python/Django and DB2. Thank you! This guide is a basic tutorial that’ll quickly get you started with the ibm_db Ruby driver. You’ll be querying DB2 from Ruby in no time, but please bear in mind that this document is not meant to be thorough (use the API reference for this purpose). Also,...

Welcome to IBM, Damien Katz

It looks like the new year has started off on the right foot. I just learned that Damien Katz, the mastermind behind CouchDB, is now an IBM employee. Not only that, but he’s being hired specifically to work on CouchDB full time. This is great news, in his own words: All the code will be Apache licensed and donated to the Apache Software Foundation, with the plan CouchDB will eventually become an official...

Guide to setting up the IBM Ruby and Python drivers for DB2 on Linux (32 or 64 bit)

  This article is obsolete. Please refer to the following articles for up do date instructions: Ruby/Rails and DB2 | Python/Django and DB2. Thank you! IBM provides the community with, among others, Ruby and Python open source drivers for DB2 (more exactly IBM databases). Ruby has a gem that packages the Rails adapter for DB2 and its prerequisite driver. As a result, the easiest way to get the Ruby driver for...

Installing DB2 9.5 on Ubuntu 7.10

The official IBM site now has DB2 Express-C 9.5 available for download. Like its previous versions it’s entirely free, so why don’t you give it a try? When running db2setup, after extracting the archive you downloaded, you may be disappointed to see that on Ubuntu 7.10 the setup program gives you the following error right out of the box: ERROR: The required library file libstdc++.so.5 is not found on...

DB2 Express-C 9.5 is available for download

IBM has just released the new version of DB2 Express-C, the free dataserver without any limits on database size or the number of users. It’s not been posted yet on the official page, but you can already download DB2 Express-C 9.5. Get the Linux version from here and the Windows version from here. Further links for all the goodies are available from this forum post. Version 9.5 brings to the table a great deal...