I have only used it with the tutorial database and simple queries of our own but it seems to have great potential. The bigest draw back I saw (and tools like Lansa have this too (at least at our current version of Lansa)) is if a user closes the web page/tab the query server job will still be running in the back ground on the i5. Basically, there seems to be no way to stop a query in the middle on the client side.
Large result sets can eat up the client's computer. The query may return the entire result set quickly and efficiently, from the server, but there still is processing on the client side that can take quite a while. I had to one time restarted my computer because of there being too much data for it to process.
It seems best for summarized or highly filtered reports / charts.
The coolest thing I have seen so far is that I can take existing SQL and import that as a report's base data. This is especially nice for SQL that is complicated with unions or inclusion of CTEs.
Web Query has a neat report feature called active HTML where it stores every thing for the report in a transportable HTML file; all the data and code to do filtering, sorting, charting, etc. Active HTML's only big draw back is its limitation on the amount of data.
Get the red book "Getting Started with DB2 Web Query for System i" and browse the support site
http://www-128.ibm.com/developerworks/spaces/DB2WebQuery
See the FAQ in the back it might answer other questions.
The product can bring down your system if you load a lot of data intensive or create queries that require it server side to do a lot of extra processing. You can get around those be forming SQL, relationships, etc. that process well as SQL code. The red book covers things like this in the back.
We currently have no production use of this tool yet as we are migrating our users from Lansa to Web Query and quite possibly will be creating a BI box to run this off of instead.
Thanks, Matt
-----Original Message-----
From: Jeff Young [mailto:cooljeff913@xxxxxxxxx]
Sent: Thursday, October 02, 2008 10:00 AM
To: midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: DB2 Web Query for i
When this was first announced, there were some questions raised regarding the stability and overall usefullness of the product.
Now that it has been around for a while, does anyone have any feedback to share?
Thanks,
Jeff Young
Sr. Programmer Analyst
IBM -e(logo) server Certified Systems Exper - iSeries Technical Solutions V5R2
IBM Certified Specialist- e(logo) server i5Series Technical Solutions Designer V5R3
IBM Certified Specialist- e(logo)server i5Series Technical Solutions Implementer V5R3
midrange.com
