Adrian Neagu and Robert Pelletier authored a db2 9.7 book which is scheduled to release in March 2012. Below is the Amazon link and you may preorder it now.. I am in the technical review board for this book and I found the content interesting , especially the code snippets for DBA tasks
About the author : Adrian Neagu
Adrian Neagu has over ten years experience as a database administrator, mainly with DB2 and Oracle databases. He started working with IBM DB2 in 2002.
He is an IBM DB2 Certified Administrator version 8.1.2 and 9, Oracle Database Administrator Certified Master 10g, Oracle Database Administrator Certified Professional 9i, 10g and Sun Certified System Administrator Solaris 10. He is an expert in many areas of database administration such as performance tuning, high availability solutions, replication, backup and recovery.
In his spare time he enjoys to cook, take photos and catch big pikes with huge jerkbaits and bulldawgs.
Below is the interview with the author Adrian Neagu. Please share your thoughts in the comments section
Amazon link:
http://www.amazon.com/IBM-DB2-Advanced-Administration-Cookbook/dp/1849683328
Interview:
Please tell in brief about your background and experience as DB2 DBA
Almost 10 years, mainly with DB2 LUW and some limited expertise with DB2 i/OS.
Your experience writing a db2 book :
This is the first book I wrote. Therefore I can not say that I am too experienced in writing, but I have a pretty broader experience in reading technical books and this probably contributed significantly in composing my chapters. The writing process itself is not easy, I and Robert were limited to a number of pages for each topic and we had to make sure that the content does not exceed those limits. There are subjects that would require probably 500-600 pages to cover let’s say in an exhaustive mode. Anyway the value of technical cookbook resides mainly in recipes.
You also have extensive experience working as Oracle DBA.. Oracle Vs DB2 – Advantages of using db2 :
Always there existed this kind of debate between Oracle, DB2 or other database supporters and fanatics: which is better, DB2 is ten times faster than Oracle on the same hardware configuration, you may save millions (and lost trillions of neurons) if you start now to migrate to DB2 and so on. Usually these types of comparisons are cooked in the kitchens of marketing departments and served to newbies and forumists on all sides to argue which one is better. In the past almost every article about database market shares started with a title such as “The bloody war of databases”.
There are a lot of benchmarks configured and run by guys who made a living from this, on systems that probably just a few companies around the world can afford and at every 6 months we have a winner: sometimes DB2, sometimes Oracle, sometimes MS SQL or Sybase. In the world of photography is a saying- “The single most important component of a camera is the twelve inches behind it, the photographer“. In my opinion this saying is true for most domains such as database administration.
What I consider really an advantage compared to Oracle is that the learning curve for DB2 is shorter, DB2 is easiest in terms of administration, probably the optimizer is better in some conditions. Other strong point is the data unload capabilities of db2dart.
Can you tell us about the biggest challenge you faced as DB2 DBA. And how did you resolve the issue ?
In general bugs related to optimizer, resolved with workarounds and fixed later.I had few situations where I had to restore some systems from scratch, but really I can not say that it is something unusual.
What are the important topics covered in your book ?
Probably each person has his own preferences and a favorite domain such as multipartioned databases, performance tuning,security, high availability. These are covered and many more such as topics related to storage, MDC, partitioned tables. We really struggled to cover as much as we could.
I am a DB2 DBA. I already have few good db2 books .Why should I buy your book ?
I Do Not consider the book a literary masterpiece like War and Peace or The Brothers Karamazov. In fact theory is theory and in the technical world choices and solutions are mostly limited regarding your daily administration tasks. The book is mainly focused on practical recipes and solutions that might be encountered in the real world. Every author has his own view about how to do various tasks and can give you a more wider perspective. This can be considered really an asset.In my opinion it is a good book and will satisfy all the needs of a DB2 DBA.
What do you think about IBM purescale. What is covered in your book about purescale ?
DB2 LUW has long time lacked a database aware clustering technology such as Oracle’s Real Application Clusters.What I have found to be an absolute strength is how locking is treated in case of adding or removing members . The only downside compared to the RAC at this time is that you need certified hardware, for shared disk you have to use GPFS and you are limited to Linux and AIX operating systems. More than likely the situation will change in the future.
Despite the fact that pureScale was introduced in version 9.8 and our book is supposed to be about DB2 9.7, I considered to include a chapter about it. It is mainly an introductory chapter about pureScale. I gave some examples related to administration and monitoring of caching facilities,members and instance.
When is the book releasing ?
it is scheduled to be released in March 2012.
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