It has been almost a year that IBM acquired SPSS. Still many business users ask how to get more out of BI tools such as Cognos. Quoting IBM:

The combination of C8 BI and SPSS predictive analytics gives IBM customers more power and accuracy in answering the question of What should I be doing in the future? The combination of the powerful C8 BI analysis of current and historical data with the predictive analytic capability of the SPSS portfolio provides IBM customers with the predictive ‘brains’ for the next generation of decision making and business optimization.
The addition of the SPSS portfolio allows customers to leverage and extend their C8 BI investment by enhancing their analysis capabilities with predictive analytics. More specifically, the addition of SPSS predictive analytics helps analyze patterns found in historical and current transaction data as well as attitudinal survey data to predict potential future outcomes and proactively act upon that insight to drive better business outcomes.
Together with the market leading reporting and dashboarding capabilities of C8 BI, this predictive intelligence can be broadly distributed ensuring that decision makers across the organization gain those insights to drive business performance.

This may sound abstract, but in practical terms, with the ability to build sophisticated data models, SPSS enables extracting the essence of the heaps of data available today, and as a result dramatically reducing the time to present actionable information to decision makers. Still too abstract? By deploying models built with SPSS, decision makers can get answers to questions that otherwise might have required massive IT investment in more infrastructure, such as storage, memory and processing power. Want to know more? Don’t hesitate to contact us at +1-303-423-4500 or 888-642-7874.

There are a number of apps written in Perl that connect to classic CC transaction gateways. Meanwhile, PayPal has become so inexpensive, that a number of merchants can save significant amounts by switching to PayPal. The folks at PayPal have published a nice framework that allows Perl applications to use PayPal for checkout:
Express Checkout through Payflow Pro…in Perl

If you need to go beyond classic SPAM and Virus filtering for your IBM Domino environment, we recommend you take a look at Lotus Protector for Mail Security. Starting at only $29.50 one time license fee per user, it is easy to see how the ROI over 1 year beats most commercially available solutions, and the ROI the 2nd year can mean as much as 75% savings over comparable solutions. A 90 day trial is available to test drive the product.

You reached the limit or your unhappy with the performance or features of your database server, and you want to move to DB2. The transition can be simple with respect to your code, as it may be just a matter of changing a few lines of code for the connection string, and setting the correct compatibility mode in DB2. But how do you move your data?

Solution

IBM has published a data migration toolkit, that has been updated to work best with DB2 9.7. Make sure you have service pack 2 installed, which is the latest service pack available as of this writing.

If you are migrating from MySQL or PostgreSQL, enable the ability to do limits and offsets in the where clause with:
db2stop force
echo Set compatibility to 01 or 0F
db2set DB2_COMPATIBILITY_VECTOR=01
db2start


References

• DB2 9.7: IBM Data Movement Tool
• MySQL to DB2 conversion guide
• IBM DB2 for MediaWiki

The home page for IBM’s main security testing tool is IBM Rational AppScan

There is also a system tools to view specific logs:
alog -o -t <log>

For example to view all the logs available, you can use:
alog -L
Then you can request the boot logs for example with:
alog -o -t boot


============ SYSTEM IDENTITY (after readcf) ============
(short domain name) $w = host-name
(canonical domain name) $j = host-name.domain.com
(subdomain name) $m = domain.com
(node name) $k = host-name
========================================================


When you look for a process in the ps output, the command line of grep often shows up:
ps auwwx | grep sshd
root 648 0.0 0.0 3732 1012 ? S Apr06 0:00 /usr/sbin/sshd
user 20807 0.0 0.0 4836 680 pts/0 S 04:31 0:00 grep /sshd
$

This can make writing scripts for automating sys admin tasks difficult.

Solution

There are many ways to get around this problem. Grep has for example exclusion pattern option. However, there is a simple way when you use a shell that allows character regular expressions: using a simple expression that will not alter what you are searching for, yet prevent the command line itself from being matched. For example:
$ ps auwwx | grep /ssh[d]
root 648 0.0 0.0 3732 1012 ? S Apr06 0:00 /usr/sbin/sshd

Notice the grep command line doesn’t appear any more in the results.

References

• Making grep work the opposite way
• How PS works
• Linux Journal Issue 196, page 76

You heard that SPSS can dramatically improve the efficiency of your data warehouse, reporting and data analytics processes. But how to get started?

Solution

Here are some links that will get you pretty far:

• SPSS Official Site
• SPSS lectures
• SPSS tutorials
• SPSS tutorials
• SPSS tools and archives
• SPSS Intro with simple stats

Since Windows Vista (that includes Windows 7), the place where programs store some of their information has changed. This makes finding the DB2 log files (equivalent of db2diag.log) more difficult.

Solution

The log files have moved under the directory tree node C:/Program Data/IBM/DB2/DB2COPY1/DB2. Under that directory there is a log and an events directory. This being Windows, the events directory has the logs that on Linux/Unix are the equivalent of the db2diag.log.

References

Windows Vista: Where is db2diag.log location?