Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, Part 1

The Intel SSD has gotten low enough in price, Ubuntu 10.04 is out with SSD friendly file systems in the .32 kernel, and I'll put in the time. I've downloaded DB2 9.7 freebie; the earlier versions have been a pain to install, so I expect this will be no exception. All for you, dear readers.

This weekend will be start of the journey. Ubuntu upgrades are basically a joke; re-build the machine is about the only avenue. I tried the 9.04 live CD, and neither my keyboard (Das Keyboard) or mouse (Logitech laser) ran. From what I can find out, 9.04 used a HAL for such, and didn't work, so they went back to config files with 9.10, which does work but doesn't have the file system goodies kernel. I haven't tried 10.04 from the CD yet, but I'm told All Will Be Well. I sure hope so.

I'll be using Graeme Birchall's "DB2 Cookbook" schema and such for the tests. I highly recommend it, though he seems to have lost interest in DB2; he says on his site that the 9.7 version would be out Dec. 2009, but nada. I had a short email conversation with him a year or so ago. I was wondering whether he found DB2/LUW much in the wild, and he admitted not so much. And he laid the blame at the feet of IBM; they're more interested in moving COBOL/VSAM crap on the mainframe then promoting the LUW version, which is still my favorite database on linux, AIX, or windoze. Neither he nor I could figure out why IBM doesn't give a rat's sphincter. It might just be a coincidence, but a few years ago Gartner stopped publishing the PR version of their database market share report. Going back from at least 2000 until they stopped (2007?), IBM's "growth" was always in the mainframe. I guess IBM got tired of trying to convince folks that DB2 on LUW was going to take over. I still prefer it.