Diary of a Database Geek

Introduction  I, like almost everybody, had assumed that Data Studio 4.1.3 was going to be the last ever release of this great old workhorse. The last fixpack (APAR7) for this release came out in July 2020, and I thought that was the end of the line. What a surprise to find that not only has IBM released Data Studio 4.1.4 as an early Christmas present on 3rd December 2021 but they'd also backed this up with an APAR1 release on 24th January 2022. So how do I get this new release, and what's new in it? Installation The installation files, for Windows and Linux are available from - https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/download-and-install-ibm-data-studio-41x You can either download from the web (requires a free IBM ID) or, if you are an IBM customer with a current support contract, from Passport Advantage. The installation isn't quite as easy as previously, since there isn't a "launchpad" script any more.  Instead you'll find two zip files - one containing a new...

This is hopefully the first of a number of articles in a series I've entitled "Up and Running" which will describe my early experiences using some new (to me) piece of technology. The rise in popularity of Visual Studio Code ( https://code.visualstudio.com/ ) has been one of the biggest phenomena in the development community over the last few years. There are many reasons for it including - It is cross-platform, supporting Windows, Mac and Linux It is open source It has a large, and constantly growing, library of extensions available Up until this point, the tool of choice for developers working with the Db2 family of databases has been IBM Data Studio. This is built on the Eclipse framework ( https://www.eclipse.org ) which became popular for many of the same reasons that VS Code is now becoming popular. The Achilles heel of Eclipse has always been that it is very resource-intensive. The Eclipse Foundation also has a next-generation IDE - Eclipse Che ( https://www.eclips...