Databases on the iPhone / iPod Touch - Updated!

Back in August of 2008 I wrote a post about some database applications available for the iPod Touch / iPhone. You can find the original post in this blog somewhere.

I think it is time for an update. As there have been a lot of new apps added to the App Store over the last 2 years, some of which are worth exploring.

• First of all a quick update. FMTouch has come down in price significantly! It is now only €7.99. It makes it a lot more accessible. Still I haven't gone for it.
  
  
• I still use CSV Touch as it is a very simple way to carry data around. With good search capabilities. However, CSV touch forces you to have a essentially a materialized view of your data as you can not perform any joins between different tables. You can think of it as carrying a number of reports on your iPhone.
  
  

Since I want to play around with SQL, I have looked at a few options. Note, there are a lot more options available these days, including things like HanDBase or AppCreator that let you develop more application like forms on the iPhone, or even clients that let you connect to corporate databases and keep copies of the data on your phone.

So to choose, I ran a search for sqlite on the App Store, and after reading about the different app features I settled on SQLite Editor as it seems to have the most features available. I am only starting with it, but so far, so good.

As always, comments are welcomed!

DB2 on Mac!!!

Yes, you read it right, finally IBM has released a version of DB2 for the Mac! On December 22nd they released a version of DB2 Express-C for Mac (Leopard on Intel), which is essentially a version for developers who will be able to now use it to work on enterprise solutions on a Mac! I never thought this day would come.!

Antonio Canguiano has an interesting blog post that discusses some first steps, very useful.

You can get DB2 from the IBM Download Page.

I installed it using Admin GUI (as root) install and the tested the Ruby connection as per Antonio's blog. Initially I had a few issues with some libraries, but after downloading the latest version from the website, all is working well now.

This initial version does not have any of the admin tools (Comand Centre, Control Centre, etc.) but I was able to use SQL Workbench/J without any issues. It seems however that some of the tool jar files are there, I will look into that later.

There is a DB2 Express Forum, but feel free to ask any questions through this blog.

Next, Ruby on Rails!!!