I'd rather play golf

In a previous post in May 2009 I expressed admiration for a SQL language feature in IBM’s DB2 product that permits one to use an update DML statement as a table expression in a query’s FROM clause. Here is a simple example to illustrate DB2′s syntax: 1 2 3 SELECT T_updated.* FROM NEW TABLE ( [...]

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This past Friday afternoon (22 May 2009) I listened to Ahmed A. Soror present work on a Virtualization Design Advisor for DBMS Workloads, follow-on work to a preliminary paper presented last summer at SIGMOD 2008 (Vancouver). Ahmed’s co-authors include a fellow graduate student, Umar Farooq Minhas, faculty members Ken Salem and Ashraf Aboulnaga, all from [...]

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Few, I think, would argue with the statement that SQL is a complex language, and there is considerable “bulk” in ANSI/ISO standard SQL that is of debatable value. What I’d like to describe in this post, however, is an extension to standard SQL that I think is really quite useful – so much so that [...]

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Today and tomorrow I’m attending the 2008 CASCON conference in Toronto, co-sponsored by the Center for Advanced Studies at the IBM Toronto Laboratory and Canada’s National Research Council. Part of the conference includes the Fifth International Workshop on Engineering Autonomic Software Systems, which was my primary reason for going. I found one paper presented in [...]

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With the widespread adoption of virtualization within data centers, and the anticipated growth of virtualized data centers (to the tune of 10K nodes, if one believes Irfan Amad of VMWare) it is pretty clear that in addition to the scalability issues, two additional problems need to be solved: The first, mentioned to me by my [...]

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In a previous post I stated that I do not believe that many firms go to the trouble of detailed performance tuning, for parameters such as buffer pool configuration, simply because it is too labour-intensive: static tuning analysis requires a workload that is (1) known and (2) fairly constant. Doing this manual performance tuning was [...]

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There is perhaps no other scientific field like Computer Science that can re-invent technology on such a regular basis and call it “new”. This is certainly true with the latest virtualization systems now available, such as VMware and Xen; twenty-five years ago I was a performance specialist with VM/CMS on IBM mainframes. The goals of [...]

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For a software system, IBM’s IMS (Information Management System) hierarchical database system is getting pretty long in the tooth – it was developed beginning in 1964 as a joint effort between IBM and Rockwell International for the Apollo moon program. That makes IMS 44 years old, an eternity in the life of a software product. [...]

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