My company provides me with a PC to do things like checking company e-mail. This PC is separate from the secure one on which I do work for our client. I figure the company PC is the best place to install a practice version of IBM DB2. It also helps that my company PC has a huge hard drive with not much on it.I also have access in my company to a lot of technical books online. One in particular titled "Understanding DB2" has helped guide me along my first DB2 install. It pointed me to "setup.exe". Of course I should have known that was the app to run for installation.
Checking the requirements for DB2, I counted myself lucky that my work computer had Windows XP Professional installed. My home PC does not have Professional so it is probably not ready to host DB2. One troubling part of the install was when I clicked on a link to see the DB2 Disk and Memory Requirements. This led me to a web page that stated "The topic that you have requested is not available." Lucky I am not a paying customer of IBM yet. Otherwise my confidence would be dropping at this point.
One nice thing about the DB2 project (and maybe any other IBM ones) is that there are APARs which document known issues. Now that sounds professional and well tracked. I did need to make some hard choices for the install. For example, I had a number of DB2 versions to choose from:
- Enterprise Server
- Workgroup Server
- Express
- Personal Edition
