Raul F. Chong is the DB2 on Campus Program Manager based at the IBM Toronto Laboratory. His main responsibility is to grow the DB2 Express community, helping members interact with one another and contributing to the forum. Raul is focusing on universities and other educational institutions promoting the DB2 on Campus program. Raul holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from the University of Toronto, and is a DB2 Certified Solutions Expert in both DB2 Administration and Application Development.
Raul joined IBM in 1997 and has held numerous positions in the company. As a DB2 consultant, Raul helped IBM business partners with migrations from other relational database management systems to DB2, as well as with database performance and application design issues. As a DB2 Technical support specialist, Raul has helped resolve DB2 problems on the OS/390, z/OS, Linux, UNIX, and Windows platforms. Raul has also worked as an information developer for the Application Development Solutions team, where he was responsible for the CLI guide and Web services material.
Raul has taught many DB2 workshops, has published numerous articles, and has contributed to the DB2 Certification exam tutorials. Raul has summarized many of his DB2 experiences through the years in his book "Understanding DB2 - Learning Visually with Examples" (ISBN 0131859161) for which he is the lead author. He has also co-authored the book "DB2 SQL PL Essential Guide for DB2 UDB on Linux, UNIX, Windows, i5/OS, and z/OS" (ISBN 0131477005).
In his spare time, Raul is an avid tennis player (though 90% of his shots go off the court!). He also enjoys watching hockey and basketball, traveling to interesting places, and experiencing new cultures. Raul is fluent in Spanish as he was born and raised in Peru, but he keeps some of the Chinese traditions from his grandparents. He also enjoys reading history and archeology books.
This book teaches DB2 UDB V8.2 visually, step-by-step, with dozens of examples and case studies drawn from the authors' unsurpassed experience
as DB2 consultants at IBM.
This book offers up-to-the-minute coverage, best practices, and tips for building basic
SQK procedures, writing flow-of-control statements, creating cursors, handling conditions,
and more.
This article introduces you to the GUI tools for DB2 UDB Express Edition for Linux and Windows V8, and describes how to use them for performing basic database operations, restricting access to objects, and setting up connectivity.
Raul Chong continues his explanation of the GUI tools that come with DB2 UDB Express. In Part 2,
he covers automating your database tasks and basic performance tuning with the GUI tools,
as well as troubleshooting problems with the GUI tools themselves.
This tutorial discusses database backup and recovery topics. It explains the different methods of database recovery and
logging, and how to use the backup, restore, and rollforward commands. This is the last tutorial in a series of six tutorials to
help you prepare for the DB2 V8.1 Linux, UNIX, and Windows Database Administration Certification (Exam 701).
This article provides an introduction to DB2 UDB for Linux, UNIX, and Windows V8 with the Database Partitioning Feature (DPF). It is the second part
of a two-part series.
For those who like to use commands instead of GUI tools, this article tells you how to get your clients connected to
DB2 servers, either on distributed systems or OS/390, using DB2 commands. It includes a cheat sheet that you can print off and keep
handy to make the process a breeze.
Part 1 of the DB2 UDB Connectivity Cheat Sheet gave you everything you need to know for connecting DB2 UDB on Linux, UNIX, and Windows to clients
or to other platforms. Part 2 takes you further, and gives you all the details for connecting DB2 UDB for z/OS clients to DB2 UDB for z/OS servers
on other platforms.
This article focuses on DB2 for iSeries connectivity. It covers three scenarios: connecting from DB2 UDB for iSeries clients
to DB2 UDB for Linux, UNIX, and Windows servers, connecting from DB2 UDB for iSeries clients to DB2 UDB for z/OS subsystem servers,
and connecting from DB2 UDB for iSeries clients to DB2 UDB for iSeries servers.
This is the fourth article discussing connectivity scenarios involving DB2 UDB for Linux, UNIX and Windows V8, DB2 UDB for iSeries V5.2, and DB2 UDB for z/OS V8. The focus of this article is on workstation application development connectivity using C and Java.
This is the fifth article in a series discussing connectivity scenarios involving DB2 UDB for Linux, UNIX, and Windows V8, DB2 UDB for iSeries 5.2 and DB2 UDB for z/OS V8. The focus of this article is on workstation application development connectivity for ADO and ADO.NET applications accessing DB2 using C++, Visual Basic, C#, and Visual Basic .NET languages.
Ever wonder what all those DB2 processes actually do? This article describes the processes that DB2 UDB uses on
Linux, UNIX, and Windows, discusses why you might need to understand these processes,
and details their functions.
This article shows DB2 UDB for UNIX, Linux, and Windows specialists how to leverage their
DB2 knowledge in these platforms to gain skills on DB2 for iSeries.
If you know DB2 UDB for UNIX, Linux, and Windows, you can leverage those skills to learn DB2 on OS/390 and z/OS. Using analogies to DB2 distributed concepts, you'll learn the basics of system administration on DB2 for OS/390 and z/OS, including subsystems, logging, configuration parameters, and more.
This is a lengthy document that provides an in-depth introduction to DB2 UDB for z/OS
and OS/390 in terms that are familiar to distributed platform users. It covers application development, tools, locking and concurrency, and much more.
If you're already familiar with Microsoft SQL Server 2000, you can leverage your SQL Server knowledge to quickly gain skills on DB2 UDB for Linux, UNIX, and Windows. The focus of the article is mainly on the Windows platform.
If you're a database specialist interested in growing your DB2 Universal Database skills, there's a good chance that you've already developed database skills with another relational database product somewhere along the way. This article shows you how to use your current knowledge of Oracle 9i to quickly gain skills in DB2 UDB for Linux, UNIX, and Windows V8.
DB2 UDB supports many storage manager server solutions to perform database backup, restore, and log archiving. Because of the large number of solutions supported, DB2 UDB documentation relies on the backup software documentation to describe how to set it up. This article describes the setup required for Veritas NetBackup and provides examples of how DB2 UDB backup and restore works.
This article describes the various DB2 UDB product information sources that are available. It compares the DB2 Information Center, the Release Notes, Technotes, and flashes. In addition, it provides tips on the most fruitful ways to search for DB2 information, describes which resources are most appropriate for finding different kinds of information, and tells how often these information sources are updated.
This article tells you what DB2 Web services are, lists the requirements for working with Web services, and describes how your application can work with DB2 as a Web services provider or a Web services consumer.
Learn how DB2 UDB handles character conversion. This article starts with a discussion of basic character code concepts including code pages, code points, and encoding schemes, followed by a more detailed explanation of how code pages are set, and how character conversion occurs. It includes some generic scenarios and examples to make the concepts easier to understand.
This article explains step-by-step techniques that can be followed to monitor and tune a DB2 UDB database server. Using the supplied sample Java program "PERFORMER," you can learn these hands-on techniques, and experiment with various scenarios on your own system, using the Java program to simulate a workload executing SQL against a database. Many factors can affect the performance of a database server. This article focuses on how to tune some of the important DB2 UDB configuration parameters, as well as steps to capture and fix "bad queries."
Granting database access, authorities, and privileges to users and groups is one of the primary means of ensuring the security of your data. This article describes the different user and group accounts that are needed to install and work with DB2 UDB for Linux, UNIX, and Windows V8.2. It also introduces the DB2 UDB security model, including user authentication, user and group authorization, and super users.
Learn about the DB2 UDB security plug-ins, a new feature introduced in Version 8.2. This article explains what the security plug-ins accomplish and teaches you how to enable and write your own security plug-ins.
If you are an experienced DB2 UDB DBA and would like to get deeper skills, this is a good book to review. It contains information about advanced DBA topics, and will also prepare you for the Advanced DBA exam 704.
Great book to review when in doubt about how to use SQL with DB2, and it's free!. Graeme updates the book constantly, so make sure to download the latest version from his Web site, and check out his "Window pictures," they are breathtaking.
This is a great article to help you understand how DB2 uses memory. Sylvia is an expert in the DB2 database engine and has contributed to the "Understanding DB2" book as a co-author.
"DB2 Tuning Tips for OLTP Applications" (developerWorks, July, 2001) by Yongli An, DB2 Performance Engineer, IBM Toronto Lab, and Peter Shum, DB2 e-business Performance Manager, IBM Toronto Lab
I enjoyed reading this article, and always refer to it to refresh my memory on performance topics. I like the format of the article: Background information is first provided followed by a description about changing the parameter values, and some investigative steps at the end.
This is a good introductory article about DB2's capability to use objects from different RDBMSs such as Oracle, Sybase, or Informix® in one single query through federation.
![Photo: [Raul Chong]](http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/i/p-spot-rchong.jpg)
