This may be hard to believe. But I uninstalled and reinstalled IBM DB2 on my machine for the 3rd time. And guess what? This time it is looking pretty good.I chose DB2 Personal Edition. For the DB2 Administration Server, I selected my domain account. It seemed strange that I needed to enter my password for this account though. Is DB2 storing my password somewhere? What if my password changes? I certainly hope this does not break the DB2 database.
When the install was complete, it reminded me to use port number 50000 to connect to the DB2 instance. I don't think I will need to remember this information. I am running a copy of the database locally. Why would I need to know what port the database is listening on? I am already on the machine when I run programs which need to connect to the database. Strange...
Now here is where the beauty comes in. I chose to install the sample database after the installation was complete. To my complete surprise, the sample database actually installed without error. This is a first. I guess by now it does not take much to impress me. The installation of the sample database took over 1 minute. So I was a bit worried. However I never got that far in the past, so I figured something must have been going right.
Currently I am using the Command Line Processor to issue SQL commands on the data in the sample database. It helps to have the Control Center open to spy on the structure of the tables in the sample database. My background is in the Oracle database. However I am finding that my basic SQL skills are pretty much still valid in DB2. I believe the next step is to review the important parts of the book "Understanding DB2" that I recently finished. It is my hope that I now have all the access to execute the commands that gave me errors before.
