The Best DB2 Ever

Over the past few days the spotlight has certainly been on Sun’s acquisition by Oracle, but today IBM made a remarkable announcement of its own. DB2 9.7 (code-named “Cobra”) will be GA (generally available) in June. This new version of DB2 is loaded with interesting features and is undoubtedly the best DB2 ever.

Within IBM we consider this to be the single most important release of DB2 since the days of DB2 UDB V5. DB2 9.5, already the fastest data server in the world, will receive a major upgrade that includes many benefits in terms of self-optimization and self-healing (autonomic computing features), compression and performance. This release will enable even greater space and related savings (including energy), making it the greenest database software available as well.

From reading the official press release, I found two cases particularly interesting (both quoted below). The first, is about a Medical Center that managed to save 50% on space and shave 35% off of the time spent on administrative tasks by switching to DB2 9.7:

UCLA Medical Center is using this technology to keep all patient records online while reducing storage space needed to manage these records by 50%. In addition, UCLA is currently developing three clinical applications using the new DB2 features that allow it to analyze and better understand patterns and trends among patients with similar symptoms or illnesses, to help determine how to better serve their patient community.

The software also includes workload management and autonomic computing features that improve the performance of high priority applications such as closing quarterly financial reports and helping IT staff more efficiently manage their growing data, leading to a time savings of up to 35% on administrative tasks.

And the second is from Openbravo:

To move a non-DB2 application to a previous version of DB2 would have taken an estimated two-year effort. We were thrilled to see it took only one week to move it to the new version of DB2. This represents a terrific opportunity to expand our international community of users, partners and developers. We’re very excited to partner with IBM to make new deployment options available,” said Paolo Juvara, CTO of Openbravo, a Web-based Solution ERP provider and IBM business partner.

Customer testimonials aside, there is a wealth of new features that will appeal to the developer as well, including improved concurrency support, new data types and functions, improved queries and procedures, state of the art XML support and much more. To learn more about the technical details of this fantastic new release, please join us for a DB2 9.7 Overview Webinar (part of the Chat with the Lab series) on May 6 at 11:30 AM ET.

Finally, if you are interested in trying out DB2 9.7 yourself, you can sign up for the DB2 9.7 Early Access Program. And don’t forget that the DB2 Express-C version is production ready and will be available absolutely free of charge.

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14 Comments

  1. Kent Fenwick April 23, 2009
  2. dbfan April 23, 2009
  3. Antonio Cangiano April 23, 2009
  4. Mario April 23, 2009
  5. Antonio Cangiano April 23, 2009
  6. Scott Southerland April 23, 2009
  7. Humberto Massa April 23, 2009
  8. Zkurvena Prace April 23, 2009
  9. Darren Skinner April 23, 2009
  10. Antonio Cangiano April 23, 2009
  11. florin April 24, 2009
  12. Jeff Self April 24, 2009
  13. Antonio Cangiano April 24, 2009
  14. Paul April 24, 2009

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