IBM Corp’s arguments that there are still many things that only the mainframe is able to do is being made to look more and more threadbare by the company’s own announcements. As a spoiler for Informix Software Inc’s announcement of its Universal Server, IBM rushed out news of the beta version of what it calls DB2 Universal Database, describing it as a multimedia and Web-enabled database – which runs under Windows NT and OS/2, and under the AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, Sinix and Santa Cruz Operation Inc Unixes. It also runs on everything from portables to the parallel RS/6000 SP2 machines, which are capable of delivering performance equivalent to the biggest mainframe if you are prepared to buy enough processors. The product, however, is only in beta test and will not be available until the middle of next year. Storing video, audio, graphics and text as well as raw data, DB2 Universal Database includes a translator between DB2 SQL and HyperText Mark-up Language Common Gateway Interface so that it can be accessed over the Internet and on intranets – if you can afford the MIPS to handle the translation on the fly. It includes built-in Java DataBase Connectivity support, and supports Java stored procedures. DB2 also includes replication support, distributed data warehousing, complex querying, Internet links, optimized transaction processing and database tools. IBM says object-relational extenders support data types such as image, video, audio and text as part of the database, and that support for fingerprint applications, spatial and time series data will be delivered next year as part of DB2 Universal Database. On price, IBM says only that the new version will be competitively priced.
