DSXchange

You can join a special area of the IBM website for certified professionals. I only visited it once. It has some forums but I hate these little IBM website enclaves because I always forget my password and can never get back in. You can also use the certification badge (available at the website) on yo...

ETL is used for a lot more projects than DW. It is also used for data migrations, data conversions, data quality, CDI, DSS, Master data management etc. DW is just a subset of the work ETL can do. On a DW project you can get away with ETL coders who do not know DW as long as you have data modelling e...

Have a look at the FAQ entry on message handlers, I added a section on the message handler file that shows the location and name of this file. Check you have the right permissions on this file.

Server routines can be called from the BASIC transformer in a parallel job, these jobs will run in the SMP or MPP but it becomes a bottleneck in your job as it runs as a single process instead of multiple processes. You can get around this by designing your BASIC transformer jobs as multiple instanc...

Two methods: set the ID in each sequence job or set it in the sequence job that calls other sequence jobs. Use a User Variables stage as this is a good way to organise your sequence job code. Inside this stage create a new user variable and in the derivation field call the SDK key routine, passing a...

7.5.2x is the only version for Windows, 7.5.1 is the latest version for Unix and Linux and the only version for USS. Version 8 is due out somewhere in the next 2 to 20 months. This should bring the Windows and Unix/Linux versions back into the one release. I think PX was present through versions 6.x...

Wow, when did it get renamed? I missed that news. Nice name. Almost tells people what the product does.

When they added Orchestrate to DataStage to give us parallel jobs they added the Orchestrate import. Most of the other imports are were originally designed for server jobs, not parallel jobs, so sometimes there is a minor metadata mismatch. This can result in some of the warnings you see when you ru...

Is there anything your job needs to do after it finishes processing data? Are there after-job routines? Is there anything on the after-sql tab? Are you doing a bulk load to a database? The database may need to rebuild indexes once the load is finished. Could the job be suffering database locking?

Your template path is stored in the windows registry on your client machine. You may have been prompted for a path when you installed your client (not sure what versions had this prompt). You can change the location by modifying the registry entry or, more drastically, reinstalling the client. I don...

Can you turn on a database trace and get the exact SQL statement being sent to the database? I don't think array size or transaction size will make a difference since you are inserting two rows with a single statement. DataStage sees it as one statement. Could it be the database is accepting one row...

One of the most loved Australians, even the people who thought he was over the top and annoying are coming around with all the stories about how genuine he was and how much he did for conservation and animal welfare. Online sites of Australia's main newspapers Sydney Morning Herald and The Age have ...

Afraid not. I will be back in Australia with my four little ones. Going to make it a challenge to blog about!

The massive IBM Information on Demand 2006 conference is on next month, it combines six conferences into one including the old Information Integration Live/AscentialWorld conference.

I collected a list of all the WebSphere Information Integration speakers and technical stream sessions.

There is no faster way to deliver updates (or upserts) to a database then a parallel transformer leading to an enterprise database stage. A basic transformer removes the benefits of parallel process, though if you are using a standard database stage you probably wont notice the performance hit.