DB2 Express-C Team Blog

On Tuesday July 28, there's a live web seminar on scaling database performance:

Join IBM and xkoto to get beyond the hype of the cloud and learn how to ensure scalability for mission-critical applications in the cloud. We'll show you step-by-step approaches to scaling transaction-intensive workloads and help you avoid some of the pitfalls along the way. You'll also see a live demonstration of IBM DB2 and xkoto GRIDSCALE scaling database workloads across active-active database servers hosted on Amazon EC2.

Attend this Webinar to learn how to:
* Understand Amazon's server and storage infrastructures
* Avoid the scalability constraints in the cloud
* Provision and configure database workloads
* Scale databases horizontally to meet application demand

Speaker Panel:
* Leon Katsnelson, Program Director, IBM
* Ariff Kassam, CTO, xkoto
* Rav Ahuja, Senior Product Manager, IBM
* Paul Lapointe, Solutions Architect, xkoto

Scalability in the Cloud: Fact or Fiction?

Tue, Jul 28, 2009 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM EDT
Tue, Jul 28, 2009 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM London
Tue, Jul 28, 2009 9:30 PM - 10:30 PM India

Cheers,

Leons Petrazickis
DB2 Express-C Community Team

Rob Williams recently did a lot of volunteer work to rebuild the IBM DB2 User Group (IDUG) website. It now runs on the free DB2 Express-C database.

For easy backup and recovery, Rob set up archiving of DB2 logs to Amazon S3.

There are no upfront costs; you only pay for what you use. The current price for this service is around $0.150 per GB per month and $0.10 per GB for data transfer. By the time you factor in all the costs for a tape system and Tivoli storage manager, this can be a very cost effective way to backup small DB2 databases with a proven technology.

Check out Rob's scripts and maybe consider setting up your own solution.

Cheers,

Leons Petrazickis
DB2 Express-C Community Team

IBM has just launched the Develop and Test on the IBM Developer Cloud site. Right now this is a free service where you can sign up and create virtual machine instances of IBM products like DB2 Express-C running in the cloud (i.e. on the internet).

So, if you want to set up a new DB2 server in a couple minutes, just mosey over to the IBM Developer Cloud, register, and instantiate a machine or two. You'll then be able to access it like any other copy of DB2:
- via DB2 command line
- from Data Studio
- from your PHP or Rails web application
- remotely via SSH
- etc.

Very handy.

On Windows, I personally like to use PuTTY for SSH and WinSCP for SCP and SFTP (basically, FTP over SSH).

Using DB2 Express-C on IBM Developer Cloud from ChannelDB2 on Vimeo.

Regards,

Leons Petrazickis
DB2 Express-C Community Team