Following our recent blog post on mobile computing and IBM i, we were contacted by our old friend George Farr. As some of you may know, George moved out of the IBM i Rational team a while back--remember the letters "IBM"stand for "I've Been Moved"--and joined the DB2 team. He's now the product manager for DB2 on mobile devices.
Luckily for us, George hasn't forgotten his roots and wrote to tell us that he had made sure that his first new product (IBM Mobile Database) would sync with DB2 on IBM i. The product is free of charge and allows you to sync to both DB2 and Informix databases. The product is part of the "IBM solidDB" family and you can find the details on this page. If you want to just jump into the details try this link. We had a lot of trouble finding these documents, but it turns out the trick is to Google with the following: "IBM Mobile Database" site:ibm.com. Note the quote marks and the "site:" part. Without those you'll get a lot of hits but nothing terribly useful! To download go to this Web page. You'll notice on the right-hand side a download link for the binary and for a sample development set-up for Eclipse. Hopefully one of our friends that works with Android will give this thing a try and get back to us with a report. Aaron Bartell are you listening?
We've also been thinking a lot about database administration of late. Several of our clients now have really huge amounts of data and are beginning to wonder if they need a dedicated DBA. We started off intending to write a blog comment on the topic, but it turned out there was a lot more to say than could really be accommodated in a blog entry, so instead you'll find it in an article in the most recent edition of the magazine's IBM i Extra e-newsletter.
Luckily for us, George hasn't forgotten his roots and wrote to tell us that he had made sure that his first new product (IBM Mobile Database) would sync with DB2 on IBM i. The product is free of charge and allows you to sync to both DB2 and Informix databases. The product is part of the "IBM solidDB" family and you can find the details on this page. If you want to just jump into the details try this link. We had a lot of trouble finding these documents, but it turns out the trick is to Google with the following: "IBM Mobile Database" site:ibm.com. Note the quote marks and the "site:" part. Without those you'll get a lot of hits but nothing terribly useful! To download go to this Web page. You'll notice on the right-hand side a download link for the binary and for a sample development set-up for Eclipse. Hopefully one of our friends that works with Android will give this thing a try and get back to us with a report. Aaron Bartell are you listening?
We've also been thinking a lot about database administration of late. Several of our clients now have really huge amounts of data and are beginning to wonder if they need a dedicated DBA. We started off intending to write a blog comment on the topic, but it turned out there was a lot more to say than could really be accommodated in a blog entry, so instead you'll find it in an article in the most recent edition of the magazine's IBM i Extra e-newsletter.
Thanks for great hints how to access the info about IBM Mobile Database.
Do you know maybe how to sync with DB2 on other mobile platforms - like iOS or recent Windows8 RT? So the mobile app can work offline and sync with the DB2 on demand?
Posted by: Marcin Perłak | October 31, 2012 at 03:02 AM
I hear that looks like that's 2013 year work.It starts to support Android from the very beginning.
Posted by: Pi Guang Ming | November 28, 2012 at 02:38 AM
Jon/Susan,
re: your article rather than this blog post.
As you know our tools are used to reverse engineer the relational model "automagically" (your term as I recall) from RPG/COBOL/SYNON. Up until about two years ago, this was primarily motivated by BI, or modernization projects at our customers. It was very rare that we were working with a DBA at an IBM i site. things are definitely changing. at least 50% of new customers for our data modelling tools, are spearheaded by DBA's, and existing customers are now employing DBA's who are now increasingly asking for more Data management features. we are obliging at a furious pace.
So it does bare out your observations, that DBA's are becoming a prominent feature at many IBM i installations.
Posted by: Stuart Milligan | November 29, 2012 at 03:42 AM