Mar

5

Heads up: IBM is looking for top notch student hackers

By Antonio Cangiano. Filed under Canada, DB2, General | 1 Comment 

As a thank you for following my blog, I’d like to introduce you to what I think is a great opportunity for the right students. My team is looking for two bright students for a 16 month, full-time internship opportunity with IBM.

Aside from being a bright and ambitious student, you should currently be working towards a Computer Science degree at any recognized University in the world (and have completed at least 2 years of your degree). You read that right, this opportunity is not limited to Canadian students. We are looking for the most talented students in the world, so as long as you’re ready to relocate to Toronto for 16 months, and are able to start the internship program in May 2010, we have the means to get you here. The location for this internship will be the Toronto Software Lab, in Markham, Ontario.

In particular, we are looking for students who are highly skilled in the area of web technologies and who are enthusiastic about cloud computing. This is NOT your run-of-the-mill, boring student job. You’ll be working with cutting edge technology on high visibility, fast paced projects that involve web technologies, cloud computing, Xp/Agile methodologies, and other related fields. You’ll be granted ample freedom to express yourself and your programming creativity. Should you be accepted for this well paid (in my opinion) internship program, you will report directly to my manager (a cool, down to earth guy) and I’ll be your mentor.

If you fit the criteria described above, please get in touch (cangiano at ca dot ibm dot com) and tell me a bit about yourself. You don’t need to attach your résumé at this stage, but if you drop me a line, I’ll be able to provide you with info on how to apply through the official IBM channels. We’ll take it from there.

Please note that I do NOT receive any form of compensation for referring you. I’m just hoping to provide a tiny subset of my readership with what could be a really great opportunity.


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Jan

21

DB2 support for Ruby/Rails turns 2.0

By Antonio Cangiano. Filed under DB2, Ruby on Rails | Leave a Comment 

The API development team just released a major version of the ibm_db gem. Detailed installation instructions are available on RubyForge (PDF). Among several improvements, there are three particularly newsworthy features:

  1. Support for Ruby 1.9;
  2. Support for mingw32, used by the latest version of the Ruby installer for Windows;;
  3. Performance and security enhancements through “automatic” parameterized queries.

As we approach the release of Rails 3, supporting Ruby 1.9 is becoming more of a necessity. Likewise, the so called “One-Click installer” on Windows has been replaced by a current project that uses mingw32, which offers a much needed performance boost on Windows. Having a mingw32 compatible gem is starting to become a requirement for many of our Windows users.

Finally, DB2 is now the only database that supports prepared statements in ActiveRecord (without changing any of the application’s code). This has important performance benefits, as I explained in my article Improve the security and performance of DB2 Ruby on Rails applications using parameterized queries, which was published today by developerWorks.


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Dec

3

Grab DB2 Express-C 9.7.1 now and join the DB2Night Show

By Antonio Cangiano. Filed under DB2 | 1 Comment 

IBM just released DB2 Express-C 9.7.1 (aka DB2 Express-C 9.7 FixPack 1). This version includes a long list of enhancements. Don’t forget to download and install it; as per its previous versions, it’s entirely free of charge.

You can grab it directly from here:

The DB2Night Show

While we are on the subject, I want to mention a great new independent initiative called the DB2Night Show. In the words of its organizers:

The DB2Night Show has the simple mission of building a fun, interactive community around DB2 LUW. Each episode will include fun stuff, education, tips, and special guests. Guests will range from industry experts to “Joe the DBA”.

The first six episodes have been wonderful, and the seventh one, which is about a comparison of DB2 Express-C with other free versions like SQL Server, as well as Cloud Computing, will air tomorrow.

You can reserve your free virtual seat for Friday, December 4, 2009 at 9am PST/ 10 am CST / 11 am EST, here. Even if you can’t make it, register anyway, so you’ll have access to replays. Every participant who attends will receive a $50 voucher to use for the Amazon EC2 cloud. Not only that, but one lucky, randomly selected attendee will also receive an Amazon.com gift certificate. With the holiday season coming up, that could come in handy. :)


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