IBM Corp this week announced the new DB2 version 4 release of the company’s flagship relational database management system, which is designed to run on the CMOS System/390 Parallel Transaction Servers – but it is a very limited release, only reaching customers participating in IBM’s Quality Partnership Programme or in a joint programme sponsored by both the DB2 and the S/390 product groups next February. No date was given for general release. Data sharing in the new release gives up to 32 DB2 systems concurrent read-write access to a single set of data. DB2 4 also supports stored procedures, application programs stored in a DB2 server and accessed by a client using SQL Call statements, which can contain multiple requests for local and remote data. The limit of concurrently connected clients is raised to 25,000 from 10,000, with 2,000 active connections at any given time. Users can split queries among processors and changes in index management and row-level locking in DB2 4 means more users can access the same data concurrently: with row-level locking, transactions lock only a single row of data rather than a full page.
