IBM, recently upbeat about its database sales, announced the immediate availability of DB2 version 8.0, which features re-worked pricing and packaging to attract medium sized businesses.
DB2 8.0 also includes improved administration and management capabilities, designed to further reduce businesses’ overhead. Changes mean that DB2 also dips a toe into the waters of IBM’s autonomic, or self-healing computing strategy.
DB2 8.0 ‘s launch comes at a difficult time for IBM and other vendors. Business spending on IT is flat with the prospects of a recovery during 2003 being increasingly pushed out.
IBM is undaunted, though, claiming increased demand for DB2. The company said sales grew 2% during the company’s recently reported third quarter. The company also claimed revenue from small and medium-sized businesses grew in the second quarter 204% compared to the same quarter twelve months before.
IBM hopes to increase DB2’s appeal with simplified pricing and re-packaging. The company said Workgroup Server Unlimited Edition, which starts at $7,500 per processor, is suited to companies of fewer than 1,000 users. Enterprise Server Edition, meanwhile, starts at $25,000 per processor – $5,000 more than the previous version.
Enterprise edition includes data warehousing, 64-bit support and advanced clustering.
Clustering is offered through IBM’s Multidimensional Data Clustering, which the company claimed can improve performance of complex business intelligence queries by up to 90% in some cases. Clustering is offered as an additional feature at $7,500 per processor.
Configuration Advisor speeds set-up by offering more than 100 parameters based on a set of questions while administration is improved through Health Center, a system that monitors database performance and alerts DBAs of problems via e-mail, pager or PDA.
Web services are also supported. A single Structured Query Language (SQL) query can span both DB2 and Web services, simplifying programming of applications.
Source: Computerwire
