IDUG News and Blogs

Moving code and containersIBM Cloud Code Engine is a fully managed, serverless platform to (not only) run your containerized workloads. It has evolved a lot since March 2021, the time when I published the blog post Migrating Cloud Functions Code to Code Engine. In 2021, there were only Code Engine apps and jobs. Earlier this year, Code Engine added...

Utilize Code Engine runtime information Over the past weeks, I started to use IBM Cloud Code Engine functions. Code Engine is IBM Cloud's fully managed, serverless platform to run containerized workloads. It offers apps, jobs, and most recently functions (Function-as-a-Service, Faas) as deployment model. The following tips and tricks help you in cutting...

Byte length of (Unicode) stringsAfter my recent blog post "🎃 Unicode characters and Db2 🕸️ 🏚️", I had some follow-up discussions. One was around how to determine the Unicode UTF-8 byte length of strings in a non-Unicode Db2 database. There were solutions proposed that required data export to analyze the data externally or to implement some functions...

The latest release of Db2 is available, labeled Db2 11.5.9 (or Db2 11.5 Mod 9 Fix Pack 0). The usual page, download Db2 fix packs by version for DB2 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows, has the binaries. The highlights of Db2 11.5.9 have their own page in the Db2 documentation.

A smiley query in Db2Recently, I had a discussion about Unicode characters and Db2. Since Db2 LUW version 9.5, new databases default to the Unicode code page. Instead of having the entire database in the Unicode code page, you can specify a CCSID (coded character set identifier) for either individual columns or the whole table when creating the table...

IDUG and Db2 celebration with cakeLast week, we had a great Db2 conference in Prague. It was a real community event. We had more than 530 attendees, about 426 of them were on-site, the others virtual in three (out of seven) streamed tracks. During the opening of the expo on Monday, a special birthday cake was served, celebrating 40 years of Db2 for...

Cleaning up unused cloud privilegesRegular account cleanup is part of account administration and security best practices, not just for cloud environments. So it is great when your cloud provider offers functionality to analyse the security setup and to detect unused (inactive) identities and privileges in your account. Over the past year, I looked...

Well, check out the IDUG 2023 EMEA Db2 Tech Conference website. If you want to use the early bird rate to register with a heavy discount, you have to hurry up. It is only available until September 1st. There is another rebate available, but it only works once: First-timer rate. And remember that the conference is already next month, in Prague.I am...

A quick post about a feature I have been asking for for several years: The Db2 driver for Python, ibm_db, has wheel support now. It means that the Python package distributes a pre-built binary with the Db2 driver (for many Python versions and most users). So far, in order to install the Db2 driver, you needed to have a build environment available....

Security feature in action: Trusted ProfileI trust you to know my old blog post about trusted contexts. Some years ago, I explained how to secure your Db2 database using trusted contexts. By establishing a trusted relationship based on specified attributes, the Db2 feature of a trusted context allows you to switch to another user ID or role, typically...

Screenshot of IDUG websiteSummer vacation is coming up, but there are certain things to take care of before. One of such things is to register for the upcoming IDUG 2023 EMEA Db2 Tech Conference. The conference is held at the Prague Congress Centre, Czech Republic, this year and runs from October 15-19. It is the main gathering for European users of...

Today, it is once again time for one of those "let's document it" blog posts. Lately, I looked into one of the IBM Cloud security features, trusted profiles based on compute resources. I described how to turn your container into a trusted identity. For developing code locally, I needed to copy over files from the Kubernetes pods to my local machine...