IBM Corp’s research labs are working on a project known as ‘Garlic’ to extend DB2 to support the management, and therefore querying and data mining, of any textual information. DB2 has been able to manage text documents since 1995 with DB2 Text Extender, but not search them. As part of the project, IBM is developing a module for DB2, which will be productized as a web- or XML-extender, which will enable DB2 to manage any textual information, including HTML and XML repositories. IBM says extending DB2’s relational management functions to text with Garlic is similar to the existing DataJoiner product which extends DB2 to manage third party relational databases. DataJoiner, by the way, is expected to be folded into DB2 and cease to be marketed as a separate product. IBM said it didn’t expect the extender module would enable the database to manage files such as spreadsheets until spreadsheet vendors enable their programs to be stored as XML files.
