data storage and management

Just like his first book Don has managed to squeeze a lot of quality information into his new book. Very much new and improved(if that is possible from his first book on DB2), this book gives everyone a helping hand in understanding and working with DB2. No matter who you are, a DBA, a programmer, support ... this book is the best one to have on your desk as a reference guide.

It can be read from cover to cover or just those chapters you need. The "tips" are just great and the humour is wonderful. Coupled with the pictures I found this book to be a great read.

If you want more information on this book or any other DB2 book(I have most of them) then please feel free to e-mail me.

Leslie Pendlebury-Bowe

As an experienced DBA and DB developer in just about every major DB product except DB2, I was disappointed that there is no book on the market explaining "in DB2, feature A works like this; feature B goes like that; feature C is entirely unique, etc. etc."
However, due to the detail and simply great authoring of the chapters regarding basic data management and data definition, everything is revealed to the trained DBA eye. It was a pleasure to read, frankly, but I'm not sure if a beginner would be able to 'read between the lines' as I did.
This book would be five stars but for the following problems- the cover seems to have be constructed with tissue paper, and in my opinion the chapters regarding embedded/external language (C, Java, etc.) and DBA administration should be carved out and put in seperate books, where they can be given proper attention.
Furthermore, codepages and general management of multilingual characters are simply absent, which is great shame because as far as I can see DB2 has the best management of all the major DB products. I'd really like to know if I'm fully exploiting the 'graphic' (double-byte character) datatype and charset translation features.

Very disappointed with the book, returned it within a week. Written in a rambling and scatter-brained manner, gives no clear details of database creation or errors regarding db2X commands. May be useful for advanced users but Oracle DBA's wanting a quick insight into DB2 database creation and administration, stay away. Goes into other aspects of DB2 very well, but pointless if you are not taught how to create/troubleshoot the damned database in the first place.