(Mike Larsen) Lately, I’ve been using the merge statement in my programs to insert or update rows in a table. I recently came across a situation where a program using merge was running every few minutes and performing updates to thousands of rows each time it ran.

(Joe Pluta) Recently, I ran into a very strange situation where a process that had been working flawlessly just stopped dead. The specifics of the case had to do with creating a new file in the IFS and then not being able to delete it or even read it.

(Meg Bernal) Db2 12 for z/OS became generally available in October 2016. Last summer, Chris Crone and I wrote a two-part blog on two highly requested SQL enhancements.

(Craig S. Mullins) Being a successful database administrator requires more than just technical acumen and deep knowledge of database systems. You also must possess a proper attitude, sufficient fortitude, and a diligent personality to achieve success in database administration.

(Lockwood Lyon) A new separately-priced software offering from IBM on z/OS systems uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to assist the Db2 Optimizer in choosing high-performance access paths for SQL statements.

(David Shirey) Watson Studio, as opposed to the APIs that we have been looking at for a couple of years, which have a single focus and perform just one sort of task, is actually more of an environment, an environment where you can work on various things and do a broad range of activities.

On this week’s Making Data Simple Podcast, we are joined by Steve Moore, IBM senior content designer and story strategist, along with Aishwarya Srinivasan, IBM data scientist and deep learning researcher.

(Scott) 93% of our audience learned something!We kicked off our 10th season of The Db2Night Show with Db2 News presented by Les King. All of the advances and updates with IBM Data Management are pretty amazing.

(Robert Catterall) It’s been almost two years since the general availability date of Db2 12 for z/OS and, by way of that new version, the availability of Db2’s native REST interface (retrofitted to Db2 11 for z/OS via APARs PI66828 and PI70477).

(Paul Tuohy) In my next two articles I am going to discuss the use of phonetic functions in SQL.