by Glenn Stephens, consultant and developer.
First published at IBM developerWorks

By combining ASP.NET with a high-performance, scalable database like DB2 Universal Database and the Borland Data Providers in C#Builder, you can get impressive data-driven Internet applications in a short amount of time with a minimum of coding. more>

Your database applications can have full-text search functionality by utilizing DB2 Text Search and using special full-text search clauses embedded in your Xquery and SQL statements. This free tutorial will walk you through how to set up text search support for your database and step you through a real-world search scenario so you will get experience configuring and coding your own full-text search functionality. Check out DB2 Text Search today.

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See how DB2 has transformed and become one of the most easy-to-use data servers around. You can virtually put your DB2 server on auto-pilot by using its business policy maintenance, built-in monitors, automated storage, lock visualization, and automatic parameter settings. We review favorite customer autonomic features for DB2 9 and discuss the new features for DB2 9.5 including a super slick Web management toolset.

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Using parts of a simple commodity trading system, this tutorial teaches you how to use WebSphere Studio and Stored Procedure Builder to build an application to access a DB2 database, including UDFs and stored procedures.You will then convert this application to a Web service. more>

Download a free trial version of IBM DB2 Universal Database™ Enterprise Server Edition. DB2 UDB is designed to meet the relational database server needs of mid- to large-size businesses. It can be deployed on Linux™, UNIX®, or Windows® servers of any size, from one CPU to hundreds of CPUs. more>

Learn the best practices of using BIRT in Design Studio. This tutorial is Part 2 of a series aimed at demonstrating the best practices for installing BIRT, using it to create reports on relational data, and then deploying them in a Web server to view them more>

The free-of-charge IBM DB2 Migration Toolkit can simplify and improve your migration to DB2 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows. This tutorial demonstrates the use of the toolkit to convert a database model from a Microsoft SQL Server DDL script to a DB2 database. The converted objects will include a stored procedure more>

Learn about the backup and recovery capabilities in IBM DB2 for Linux, UNIX, and Windows. In addition, follow a step-by-step approach to recovering data in various failure scenarios more>

Download free trial versions of these featured IBM products. more>

Materialized data tables, or MQTs, can significantly improve the performance of queries. more>

Pure XML data server: DB2 9 is the only database product able to seamlessly manage both relational data and pure XML data without requiring XML to be reformatted. DB2 9 is a leading edge hybrid data server capable of supporting both relational and pure XML storage and provides all the necessary services to support both data structures. It also has tons of new features that increase performance and scalability for both XML and relational data. Click "read more" to find out more! more>

UDFs (user-defined functions) are used to enhance and extend DB2 functionality beyond its rich built-in feature set. This free tutorial will discuss SQL functions and step you through how user-defined functions are created. The tutorial will also go over the SQL function structure and the process of function development in SQL. This is part three of a six part tutorial series designed to prepare you for IBM Certification Exam 735 for IBM DB2 SQL Procedure Developer.

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Web Development without Coding: This is part one of a two part series on creating web applications without writing any code. The website developed in the tutorial leverages WebSphere for the application server, DB2 for the database, and Rational Application Developer for simple application creation. more>

Learn how to use Rational Application Developer to build a Web application using data from a DB2 database, and publish your page to a WebSphere Application Server, all without writing any code. In this tutorial, IBM's middleware takes care of all the hard work so you can focus on your own unique business logic. Part 1 showed you how to install, set up, and configure trial versions of Rational Application Developer for WebSphere Software, DB2 Enterprise V9.0, and WebSphere Application Server V6.1. Part 2 shows you how to build an application. more>

Experience the combined power of DB2 Query Patroller and DB2 Performance Expert. To further improve data server performance, these complementary tools have been bundled together to form the Performance Optimization feature of DB2 9. The contents of this eKit will teach you how the DB2 9 Performance Optimization feature for DB2 Linux, UNIX and Windows can help improve your performance, throughput, and response times. more>

The purpose of this tutorial is to help newcomers to IBM DB2 9 learn how to use ASP.NET. It acts as a quick, interactive guide that teaches you to develop RAD Web Applications using the powerful IBM data platform DB2 9 and ASP.NET v2. After following the steps presented in this tutorial, you will see how easy it is to work with master-detail relationships using ASP.NET v2. more>

The Business Intelligence Reporting Tool (BIRT), an open source tool for report generation, is very useful to DB2 Data Warehouse Edition users because of its ability to generate reports based on relational data and provide interactivity between them. This series of tutorials demonstrates the best practices for installing BIRT, using it to create reports on relational data, and then deploying those reports in a Web server to view them. During the course of this tutorial, you will learn the best practices of using BIRT in Design Studio. more>

This free IBM Certification Exam 735 tutorial introduces DB2 SQL procedures for version 9.5. We will go over the basics of stored procedures, the difference between external procedures and stored procedures, and the advantage of stored procedures. The tutorial will discuss different types of SQL procedure statements, and show how to share and invoke nested store procedures as well as how to test, deploy and secure SQL procedures. This is part two in a six part tutorial series to prepare you for the IBM Certification Exam 735 for DB2 9.5 Database Developer.

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In this IBM Certification Exam 735 tutorial, we will teach you about the DB2 SQL Procedural Language including declaring conditions, variables, and handlers, iterative statements and flow of control, and error-handling strategies. This tutorial is part one in a six part tutorial series to assist in your preparation for the IBM Certification Exam 735 for DB2 9.5 SQL Procedure Developer. This part of the series focuses on Section 1 of the exam, titled “SQL Procedure Language”.

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This IBM Certification Exam 735 tutorial will teach you about DB2 temporary tables, savepoints, ADMIN_CMD, and various advanced SQL functionality. This is part five in a six part tutorial series for preparing for the IBM Certification Exam 735 for DB2 9.5 SQL Procedure Developer. Start this free IBM tutorial for DB2 9.5. advanced SQL features.

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