By Timothy Prickett Morgan
Among the new features included in IBM Corp’s latest release of its DB2 Universal Database this week (see Top Stories) are a whole set that will help IBM compete more effectively with databases from the open systems world. Specifically, DB2 V6.1 will include support for 18 character table and column names, 255 character index key lengths, 32Kb SQL statement sizes and 8Kb variable character data type sizes. In addition, IBM is providing database conversion tools in partnership with ManTech and Bunker Hill. ManTech already offers the SQL Conversion Workbench to port Informix, SQL Server and Sybase databases to DB2; Bunker Hill’s Scriptoria offers similar capabilities for moving Oracle and Access databases to DB2. With the two, IBM has most of the database ground covered, with exceptions in Europe with Software AG’s Adabas and a few mainframe and Unix products from Computer Associates. For those intent on DB2 co-existence with Microsoft technologies, V6.1 will be able to access OLE DB objects and make use of them; V5.2 allowed them to be stored within a DB2 database, but DB2 didn’t know what to do with them.
Perhaps more significantly for the future, DB2 V6.1 will include support for XML as a data type (this will be in beta form) and will include an XML search capability so DB2 text searches can be restricted to XML documents to look for useful information within them as part of an application. V6.1 will also allow customers to create stored procedures in Java on a Unix or NT machine and distribute them to other DB2 databases running on Unix, NT, OS/2 or OS/390 machines. (This cross platform support has not as yet been offered for OS/400’s DB2/400 V4R4 version of DB2, which also ships this week minus support for binary large object data types, which is expected to ship separately from OS/400 by September.)
DB2 V6.1 also includes a new Index SmartGuide to help customers monitor indices and decide on which ones they should build to help speed up transactions on their boxes. The database will also include better optimization of star joins as well as larger page sizes – 16Kb and 32Kb – to help cut down on I/Os and thereby increase performance.
Janet Perna, general manager of IBM Data Management and the person most responsible for driving DB2’s increasing success in the open systems market, says that DB2 sales during the first quarter have been keeping pace with last year’s impressive results (for IBM, at least) in the database market. According to Dataquest, in 1998 IBM unseated rival Oracle as the top money maker in the database arena. Of course, Dataquest’s rankings included heavy monthly license fees for S/390 DB2, SQL-DS, IMS and VSAM (the latter two being a flat file databases, not relational products) as well as sales of the AS/400’s integrated DB2/400 database when ranking IBM against Oracle, which primarily sells Unix and NT relational products and is still the dominant vendor in those areas. Nonetheless, IBM has made great progress, mainly because of the increasing adoption of its DB2 products in the Unix and NT space. Perna says that IBM has an installed base of over 1.1 million DB2 servers at over 225,000 companies with a combined 40 million users. While she was not specific about the breakdown, there are just about 200,000 AS/400 companies with DB2/400 (running about 500,000 machines) and about 10,000 mainframe shops in the world (with perhaps 30,000 machines and probably only half of them with DB2) accounting for about 30 million of those users. IBM has hundreds of thousands of OS/2- based servers running DB2, supporting distributed applications, and perhaps as much as half the 100,000 servers in the RS/6000 installed base run DB2. Oddly enough, OS/2 and RS/6000 servers may together account for the greatest number of DB2 servers, but the smallest aggregate base of DB2 users.
Last year, IBM said that about 60% of its total middleware sales – which includes databases, transaction monitors, systems management code, messaging and groupware software and other products – ended up on S/390 machines, but that half of the remaining software ended up on non-IBM platforms like Solaris, HP-UX and competitors’ PC servers. IBM apparently is building up not only momentum in the Unix and NT markets with DB2, but looks likely to see these two areas bringing in revenues and profits akin to those in the AS/400 market sometime in the next 12 to 18 months. Perna says that in the first quarter, DB2 revenues from S/390 platforms was up 13% compared to last year’s quarter, not much considering IBM shipped 80% more MIPS in the quarter than it did last year. This suggests that customers are unplugging older mainframes and consolidating workloads more than they are loading up new applications on their mainframes. Sales of DB2 software on AS/400s was up a meager 10%, not bad considering that AS/400 sales were off 11% in the quarter, though. That probably means that a subset of AS/400 customers using IBM’s RISC-based AS/400 models are opting to upgrade to the new OS/400 V4 rather than buy a whole new Northstar AS/400e model to gain access to the e- business software and object relational database functions that is embedded in OS/400.
Perna said that sales of DB2 licenses for NT servers was up 123%, an excellent growth rate but starting from a small revenue base last year, and that revenues on Unix platforms was up a respectable 43% compared to last year. These gains were driven in part by a modest 2% increase in RS/6000 server sales in the quarter (growth at the high end of the RS/6000 line with 64-bit Northstar SMP servers and Power3-based SP parallel servers was probably in the double digits, and maybe even as high as 20% to 25% as customers continue to use these machines to support ERP and e-business applications). When you add it all up, IBM says that its DB2 sales are growing faster than the rate of growth in the database industry at large.
