Featured

The Autumn That Nearly Drowned Me

For more than 5 years I’ve managed to average at least one blog entry a week through fluctuating workloads and even through changing employers. And then came this autumn. The combination of a couple of large clients and going into holiday peak period for a couple of retail clients, collided with the IDUG EMEA conference where I was presenting two new sessions nearly combined to do me in.

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Featured / IDUG

IDUG Down Under

Sometimes I think that Db2 is one of the most widely used but least known databases. Db2 has been adopted all over the world and that scope is evident when the International Db2 User Group (IDUG) holds a technical conference on at least three different continents each year. I’ve traveled and spoken in North America and Europe but now I get to cross IDUG Australia off my bucket list.

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Featured

Announcing DISCOVER.DB2

When I was in my early thirties, I was diagnosed with a learning disability. This really put my learning style into perspective. Teaching myself via a book was incredibly hard, and still is in some ways. Where I thrived was with hands on labs and engaging speakers.

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Featured

What do I Think Data Science is?

This is one of those blog entries that I write and I know it will be obsolete and I will show my own ignorance and cringe at it in five years, but I have to write it anyway. I know that Iam biased. I come from a relational database background, and am working hard to open my mind the new data techniques that seem so popular these days.

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Uncategorized

RDBMS Basics: Indexes and Clustered Indexes

What is an index in an RDBMS(Relational DataBase Management System), and what are the benefits and drawbacks of using an index? Why don’t we index everything? How is a clustered index different? Indexes are powerful tools in relational databases. They can speed up performance of queries exponentially, but they can also slow down inserts, updates, and deletes. Let’s take a look at indexing and why it is so important to RDBMS performance, good or bad.

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