Hello,

I am fairly familiar with Oracle and need to move to DB2 for an
application within the next few weeks. I have taken a quick look at
IBM's site and documentation and it looks fairly similar to Oracle in
its features. I have a few questions that might seem trivial but
would help a newbie navigate this transition:

1) Firts off, is there a recommended book(s)? I have gone through
Amazon, and from what I can gather, the books are either outdated
(versions 6, 7, etc.) and/or not recommended by the reviewers? Would
the best place be IBM's own product documentation?

2) What version is recommended? The latest version 8.1, an earlier
version, or perhaps the new Stinger version?

3) Given that DB2 is "universal" and it runs, well, pretty much
anywhere, from PC's to Unix/Linux and to mainframes, how does one
establish connectivity to a DB2 server in a platform-independent
fashion as in ODBC? Or would this be customized for each platform?

4) I have seen a few book titles that specifically say something like
"DB2 for Windows/Unix". I am confused by this. As far as Oracle
goes, for instance, I can write the same SQL or PL/SQL code, and I
would be confident that it would run on all platforms that Oracle
supports. Is this not the case with DB2, meaning that DB2
functionality changes from platform to platform? Or does this have to
do mainly with admin tasks?

DB