By Timothy Prickett Morgan
IBM takes the wraps off the next incarnation of its DB2 Universal Database this week. The new DB2 Version 6.1 will run on AIX, HP- UX, Solaris and SCO UnixWare, just like prior versions, as well as on Windows NT and OS/2 Warp. DB2 6.1 includes a number of new features, none of which is as obvious as adding object data types to a relational database (that was V5), but which are nonetheless going to be important for IBM as its seeks to expand DB2’s presence in the open systems market.
To start with, DB2 V6.1 will include a whole slew of features that match those from competitive databases in the open systems market to facilitate migration from Oracle, Informix, Sybase and Microsoft’s SQL Server and Access database. It will also include support for XML as a data type and include an XML search capability. In addition to technical enhancements, IBM has been hard at work wringing more performance out of DB2 and come up with a better pricing mechanism. IBM says that SAP, Baan and PeopleSoft ERP suites have been tested with the new DB2 and run from 20% to 120% faster than under prior releases of the software (benchmarking details are on the way, IBM says).
IBM also says that when it ships V6.1 on July 31, it will also announce the general availability of its Linux version. Tire kickers have downloaded 34,000 copies of DB2 for Linux since IBM put it up on its alphaWorks web site late last year; no word on whether IBM will give the Linux version away for free or charge for it, but odds are it will keep a crippled version on its web site for evaluation and charge the same for the Linux version as it does for other Unix implementations. IBM also says it is working with Sequent to get DB2 ported to ptx – presumably UnixWare/ptx – which it expects to have in beta by later this year.
Perhaps most significantly, IBM is changing its per user pricing scheme on the DB2 Enterprise Edition and Extended Enterprise Edition (which includes support for parallel queries on Solaris, AIX and NT servers, among other things). Now it will charge per processor, with prices starting at $12,500 for DB2 EE V6.1 for a single CPU model. (Further pricing details were not available at press time.) IBM intends to keep user-based pricing on its DB2 Workgroup Edition and DB2 Connect product, but will put a cap on the number of users customers have to pay for, thus cutting the bill for big DB2 users.
