(Roman Kharkovski) In the last couple of months I have done quite a bit of business travel – spent few weeks in Russia and Japan (travel photos). One of the subjects that came up often in discussions with customers was the problem of consolidating multiple Java workloads and reducing the server spra

(Ember Crooks) Backups are so ingrained into DBAs. They should really be the first and the last thing we think of and ensure we do properly. We do regular backups so we can get data back in case of some failure, be it human, software, or hardware.

(Craig S. Mullins) We all can relate to dealing with systems that have data integrity problems. But some data integrity problems can be cleaned up using a touch of SQL. Consider the common data entry problem of extraneous spaces (or blanks) inserted into a name field.

(Azadeh Ahadian, Dario Kramer and Indrani Ghatare) The growing number of relational databases on the cloud accentuates the need for data protection and auditing. InfoSphere Guardium offers real-time database security and monitoring, fine-grain database auditing, automated compliance reporting, dat

(Chintamani (Chin) Sahoo) IBM WebSphere DataPower SOA Appliances are purpose built computing devices that provide many integration end points for backend services. WebSphere MQ is one of the services used with DataPower to process messages in the enterprise. The integration of DataPower application

(Robert Catterall) The other day I got a note, from a DB2 for z/OS DBA, in which I was asked for my thoughts regarding the selection of page size for a table space. I typed out what I hoped would be a useful response, and found myself thinking, as I sometimes do, “Hey — I could turn this into a […]

(Julian) Over the past 25 years of working with Mainframes, one aspect has proved to be a constant challenge – Mainframe pricing. Mainframe software charges are usually based on peak usage. Whatever an organisations’ peak workload in a given month is what they pay for.

(mkrafick) I thought it would be relatively easy to investigate encryption for our environment. I was wrong, was just plain confusing. This was not because encryption is complicated per se, but that a DBA really needs to have a good understanding of business needs. If you don’t have this understandi

(John Santoro) By automating critical business decisions, a Business Rules Management System (BRMS) can increase the productivity, consistency, and quality of your most important business processes. To realize these benefits, a BRMS must make it easy to capture your company’s expertise as rules, mus

(Terry Borden, Greg Dyck, Nicholas Matsakis, Zhuang Lei, Wu Hao, Chunxin Yang and Xuelian Zhang) The z/OS Language Environment (LE) component provides a common runtime environment for the IBM version of certain high-level languages. LE provides runtime options that can be customized according to th