Couple of days ago I’ve attended a nice db2 seminar on my campus. Mr Raul Chong was the speaker and did a two part presentation. The first part focused on some basic aspects of db2 and then passed over to it’s use in Web 2.0 applications. The first part was nice and I’ve picked up a couple of tips, I had issues with the Web 2.0 presentation. Basically it was a flash presentation of a pre-baked Ruby on Rails application that makes very little sense to me, if you do a demo of RoR you must do the full CRUD code generation and all. How can you figure out what is RoR good for out of a done site if you don’t even know what Ruby is (like 90% of the attendees)?

As far as pointing out the opportunity in getting to know db2 the whole presentation kicks off with showing that db2 DBA’s get an average of 77K salary (like MS SqlServer), then follow Oracle and Postgres with 70K (good for me then ) while MySql averages around 64K.

One thing I didn’t find an answer is whether we’ll see a JDBC 4.0 compliant driver soon. Raul hopes it’ll be out with the Viper 2 release but he was not sure. Also useful tip about db2, the Express-C version has no size limitation, the limits are on CPU (2 dual cores) and RAM (4GB). Pretty reasonable I’d say. Also nice to know IBM is paying attention to PHP, Zend, RoR and giving back some love.

Out of the technical aspects I’ve appreciated most the technical aspects of how is the XML data type implemented in a separate hierarchical data store that can be indexed and traversed nicely, Raul said competitors used more traditional approaches so I’ll need to investigate that, I personally hope it’s just FUD but it could be true. SQL extensions so you can do xpath and xquery queries was also very nice (but short). The other thing that I liked is how he demoed row contention between updates, and also the timer that checks for deadlocks periodically.

So all in all, I’d give it a 100-150 beginner level (although I have some db and db2 experience so I could be immune to some stuff), if it’s up to me I’d go with more advanced stuff, especially because we were on a Engineering faculty. Also, for me, PHP/Ruby are cool but I don’t see the point of presenting them without actually doing some rapid prototyping live on stage. IBM will re-brand it’s database offering and make it less db2′ish as they have bought another db so they will ditch the db2 from many commands.

One thing to notice as well is that IBM is trying to spread the word on db2 on campuses and encourages students to participate with a Student Ambassador program for which they will give certain benefits.

If it was up to me I would have featured JEE

I’ve picked up this blog aggregator on db2 news planetdb2.com.