(Robert Catterall) If your organization runs DB2 on a mainframe server, are you using stored procedures? If so, good – plan on using them more extensively. If you’re not using DB2 stored procedures, get moving with respect to putting an implementation plan in place.

(Dinesh Asanka) SQL Server 2008 has arrived – not fully, but as a CTP version. Whenever you hear about new software, the first and most obvious question is “What are the new features?”. There are many new features and facilities in SQL Server 2008. This article is going to cover the newly introduce

(peterd) The following example shows how you can sort an XML document by converting it into an XMLListCollection and applying a sort. You can also easily reverse the current sort by calling the SortField object’s reverse() method and refreshing the XMLListCollection object.

(Michael Hickins) The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is releasing a new taxonomy for Extensible Business Reporting Language on Dec. 4 in the hopes of improving financial reporting and analysis.

(Tony Patton) Even though we are at version 3.5 of the .NET Framework and ASP.NET, I am still having fun exploring some of the cool features that were added in version 2.0.

(Steven Smith) A fairly common task in some of the applications I work with is to provide a user with a DropDownList of options that is populated by an enum. This can easily be done with a little bit of code to bind a stock DropDownList control to the enum, but this kind of thing quickly starts to

(Troy Coleman) I’ve been traveling around the country talking to people about the great benefits of upgrading to DB2 9. My presentation with Roger Miller–“Top 10 Reasons To Deploy DB2 9 For z/OS Now!”– offers more details than I have room for here.

(Rajan Kumar and Brent Gross) IBM Data Server Provider for .NET and IBM Database Add-ins for Visual Studio support multiple IBM data servers, including DB2, Informix Dynamic Server, and the IBM U2 data servers, UniVerse, and UniData. This article is the first of a series of articles and tutorials th

(yas) A new note called “10g Upgrade Companion” has been published in Metalink recently. The note talks about the upgrade from 9i to 10g and lists recommended patches, behavior changes and best practices. While I was going through it I saw something I was not aware of before. In the “behavior change

(Steve Callan) One of the basic facts or concepts that virtually all DBAs know is that truncating a table to remove data is faster than deleting the same data. But beyond that truism, there are subtle differences that when taken into account, can help improve the overall performance of a job or proc