By Gene Cobb

If you have been following recent IT industry trends, you may have noticed that there has been a lot of activity in the area of Business Intelligence (BI). Mergers, major acquisitions, and announcements have dominated the headlines in the past year. IBM has been quite active in this area as well. The recent acquisition of Cognos and the announcement of the Dynamic Data Warehouse Initiative are evidence of this. But IBM's i5/OS investment in and commitment to BI has not just been recent; it has been a point of emphasis in the last several releases, going back to V4R1. Consider some of the following database enhancements that have been built into the operating system over the last decade and beyond:

By Jarek Miszczyk

With V6R1 DB2 for i5/OS, the transition of SQL workloads from Classic Query Engine (CQE) to the new SQL Query Engine (SQE) has been basically completed. So far, the SQE functionality has been delivered in six waves:

New capabilities allow designers and programmers to continue to produce new and exciting applications.

By Jim Flanagan

Because DB2 for i5/OS is embedded within i5/OS, application designers and programmers likely expected that with the V6R1 release of i5/OS there would be plenty of database enhancements included. They weren't disappointed, because the developers of DB2 for i5/OS have been busy developing many new functions and enhancements that should be of interest to anyone that works with the database. (Isn't that everyone?)

Learn how to exploit ADO.NET 2.0 enhancements, DAAB, distributed transactions, and more.

By Jarek Miszczyk

Over the last couple of years, I wrote several articles and white papers that dealt with Microsoft .NET Framework integration with DB2 for i5/OS. Judging from the readers' interest and feedback, this topic is very popular, especially among those System i users who rely on Microsoft tools for in-house software development. In the past, some of the developers expressed their concern that the DB2 for i5/OS .NET provider did not keep pace with Microsoft's quickly changing .NET specification. Well, I have good news to report: The so-called native DB2 for i5/OS .NET provider that ships with System i Access for Windows V6R1 (formerly known as Client Access) sports an impressive list of enhancements and improvements. In this article, I highlight the most important features of the new version of the provider and illustrate them with practical code examples.

You have to be running at least V5R4 to load DB2 Web Query, and there are some PTFs to install. But help is just a phone call away.

By Chris Smith

Those folks at Centerfield Technology certainly are on their toes. An opportunity arises in their field (which is databases), and they're on it. This week the company introduced a new service: installing, configuring, and verifying the functionality of DB2 Web Query for System i.

When I saw the Centerfield announcement, I was a bit puzzled because I had been reading about the application's features and how easy Web Query is to use: so easy, it's said, even a manager can do it (just kidding!). I never dreamed, however, that it would require a consultant to install and configure it.

By Gene Cobb

In July of 2007, IBM announced DB2 Web Query for System i, a product positioned as a query and reporting tool for the System i and the strategic enhancement to the Query/400 tool. DB2 Web Query has many advantages over Query/400. Most notably, it provides modernized development and end-user interfaces via a Web browser as well as modern report output formats such as HTML to the browser, Excel spreadsheets, and PDF. For more information on DB2 Web Query, download the IBM Redbook titled Getting Started with DB2 Web Query for System i.