Immersing myself in data and database

With the buzz of Big Data, is it coincidence or deliberate measure on my part to learn more about database?

This week I finally complete the 7 week online course - M102: MongoDB for DBAs. A great course offered by MongoDB Inc. (formerly known as 10gen).

Not only do I get to learn about MongoDB, it also help me brush up on basic DBA stuff as well as infrastructure architecture for data storage.

As part of my job, I got to attend a the "DB2 10 for Linux, Unix and Windows Fundamentals" offered by IBM here locally in Hong Kong. I wasn't too excited on the first day about typical DBA administrative task, but the second day got more interested. From the course, I get to learn more about the theory behind column-based database and some basics around how DB2 implemented with their fancy name BLU Acceleration. 

Another interesting topic is Temporal Table feature in DB2. After some Googling, Temporal Table has been standardized into the ISO/IEC 9075:2011 or SQL 2011! It is already yesterday news. Even opensource database such as PostgreSQL supports Temporal Tables. I still recall those days manually doing it in the application layer, then later using Hibernate Envrs or EclipseLink History Policy and thought I was cool. Now this stuff is natively supported in standard SQL.