(Paul Holm) I’m all for platform independence, but the facts are the majority of WebSphere and iSeries shops are also running Windows-based desktops with Microsoft Office — Word, Excel, Outlook, etc. (R)

(Vladimir Stojanovski) An updated release of Alphablox (8.3) was released to select customers in December, 2005, with some minor improvements. The previous release, version 8.2 was made available way back in December, 2004. Not familiar with this OLAP product? I’ll be happy to elucidate.

(Paolo Bruni, Marcelo Antonelli, Norbert Heck, John Jenkins and Ernie Mancill) IBM Tivoli OMEGAMON XE for DB2 Performance Expert on z/OS represents the effort on converging OMEGAMON XE for DB2 and DB2 Performance Expert into one product that retains the best features of each. This new tool gives you

(David A. Utter) If the reports can be believed, former IBM DB2 leader Don Haderle may be advising the next challenger to Oracle, Microsoft, and even IBM.

(Willie Favero) One of the reasons I am often given by customers for not diving into the wonderful world of large objects (LOBs) has been the lack of support in the LOAD and UNLOAD utilities. The LOAD is especially needed to be able to easily move a LOB into the appropriate table.

(Andre Tost and Victor Dogaru) In this article you learn how the IBM Rational Spatial Integration Adapter facilitates the development of geospatial portlets. It will demonstrate some of the features of the spatial adapter, from building a simple spatial portlet to customizing one of the samples pack

(Sean McCown) Code-named “Viper” and due for release in early summer, will be more worthy of its “Universal Database” tagline than previous versions. Not only does Viper contain an extensive list of enhancements that cover everything from security and development to storage and administration, but t

(Sonali Surange) Exposing and consuming information from databases as Web services is becoming a key requirement for businesses implementing heterogeneous scalable solutions. IBM Database Add-ins for Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 supports exposing DB2 Universal Database (DB2 UDB) information as Web s

Online analytical processing (OLAP) is a technique for summarizing and interrogating data along multiple dimensions. As such, it is a valuable tool for any organization that must make sense of a large volume of data quickly. (pdf)

(Sean McCown) I often wonder who will ultimatly take the lion’s share of the database market. Oracle and Microsoft seem to have a strong lead while IBM and Sybase seem to be lagging behind. And for some reason Sybase seems to be almost not even on the same course as the others.