Only 5 weeks from acquisition to death. No more licenses for existing customers, either. Harsh.

The DB2 data movement tool sounds like an excellent way to move stuff from, say, MySQL to DB2. I should see if I can use it to move a MediaWiki database.

Speaking of MediaWiki, I swear I’ll have a patched zip of 1.15 ready any day now.:-)

My buddy Antonio investigated what today’s busy android should use to count electric sheep.

Turns out it’s DB2. Heh.:-)

Find the hour to watch this video. They get everything really, really right. Plus, it looks to integrate well with everything. I look forward to using Google Wave for all my personal communication, as well as using a private install of Google Wave at IBM for all my business communication.

The two javascript functions above are very useful. The first one executes something after a set delay, and the second executes something at regular intervals. The syntax is very similar.

Unfortunately, they weren’t working for me earlier. It turns out I wasn’t fully-qualifying them. Specifically, I was calling setTimeout() rather than window.setTimeout(). The latter works.

Most examples use the abbreviated form, which consistently doesn’t work for me.

Looks like the original cofounder of MySQL Inc, Monty Widenius, is forking MySQL. He’s going to try to merge with all the other forks, but I suspect that Oracle will not be interested in merging something they just bought with this particular fork. Especially since it will not support InnoDB, an alternate MySQL engine bought by Oracle some time before they bought regular MySQL.

I now edit the Computers: Software: Databases: IBM DB2 category at dmoz.org open directory project.

Directories used to be important in the mid-1990s, as they tended to provide better search results than dumb link crawlers like Altavista. Yahoo started off as a human-edited hierarchical directory of links and adopted the crawler approach later.

However, since Google has come along with a better search algorithm, directories are in decline. dmoz is the only major one left, and this hasn’t escaped the notice of SEO folk, who chase the prestigious linkback and fill the submission queue with a lot of crud.

Feel free to suggest a URL for inclusion.:-)

One thing I just did at work was use SurveyMonkey to put together a quick survey about the DB2 Express-C download experience.

I do wish they offered a prefilled dropdown with a list of countries, though.

Another SurveyMonkey limitation I just encountered is the need to pony up some dough in order to have more than three trackable links to a survey.

Still, the site seems to be fairly rugged. I am happy with its reporting capabilities from past experience.

One thing I recently did at work was put together the Upgrade to DB2 9.5 site.

End of base support is coming for DB2 8.2 on April 30, 2009. There are several reasons to move to DB2 9.5 before — both business and technical.

The thing is, IBM doesn’t sell a release of DB2 — it sells DB2. If you’ve bought one release of DB2, you’ve bought them all for as long as your support holds out. You might as well be running as the best, most performant release — and that release is DB2 9.5. It’s cheaper, smarter, more secure, and more performant than DB2 8.2 or virtually anything else out there.

DB2 for z/OS folks will want to upgrade any copies of DB2 Connect to 9.5.

If you’ve seen IBM sites before, this one looks a bit different. There are some pretty strict guidelines for what can go on ibm.com, and we got to push the letter of them to limit. This got us a site that is clean, focused, and visually appealing.

My team has also put together a media pack for anyone who’d like to raise awareness about the end-of-support for DB2 8.2. Feel free to use any of these graphics on your blogs, personal sites, and similar endeavours:

(As usual, this blog contains my own opinions and doesn’t represent IBM in any official capacity.)

DB2 v9.5 uses the Windows username as the default schema. Unfortunately, it does not support spaces in schema names. Accordingly, usernames - e.g. “Jane Smith” — that have a space can make DB2 unhappy.

I recently helped someone resolve an issue with this command:

Which brought up this error:

The full routine name is CREATE_SQL_SAMPLE. It tries to create tables for Jane Smith, fails, and blazes bravely on. Interestingly, an empty database results.

The workaround is to log in as a user without a space, such as “db2admin”, run db2sampl, and then log back in as yourself.

For running future queries, you can specify a different schema:

And, of course, you can always explicitly specify a schema in your queries: