Comments on: The Best DB2 Ever

By: DB2 Express-C 9.7 and the Django adapter released | Zen and the Art of Programming

Fri, 19 Jun 2009 20:29:10 +0000

[…] those of us who love DB2, as DB2 Express-C 9.7 has just been released. As mentioned before, this is the best DB2 ever, and an extremely important […]

By: Paul

Paul — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 02:04:59 +0000

DB2 is very disappointing!

I have just wasted many hours just trying to get a simple Windows Ruby Application ( which speaks just fine to MySQL and MS SQL Server ) to speak to our iSeries running DB2. It’s horrendous! IBM has made it very difficult to configure the adapter/connector (which requires another $ license) and use and the IBM documentation is horrible! It took hours just to find what was needed!

And commercial support for ‘just 3k per year’ is way over the top. IBM needs to look at the world economy and get real! PostGres and MySql are going to eat it’s lunch with this community.

By: Antonio Cangiano

Antonio Cangiano — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 16:11:09 +0000

@florin: The free version of DB2 Express-C will take advantage of up to 2 GB of RAM and 2 Cores, regardless of the hardware available on your machine. There are no limits on the database size, number of concurrent users, or anything like that. By purchasing commercial support for less than $3K a year, the limit is raised to 4 GB of RAM and 4 actively used cores (2 CPUs), as well as obtaining 24/7 support from IBM and additional, more advanced features like High Availability and Disaster Recovery (HADR) and SQL Replication.

@Jeff Self: The Django adapter will most likely ship at the same time as DB2 9.7 (if not sooner). I’m not sure if the OS X version of DB2 Express-C 9.7 will be available at the same time as the Linux and Windows versions, but we’ll definitely try to have a version out as soon as we can.

By: Jeff Self

Jeff Self — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 15:39:21 +0000

9.7 looks really good. Will it be available for OS X at the same time?

Any word on the Django plugin?

By: florin

florin — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 15:34:08 +0000

What are the limitations of the free DB2 Express-C?

By: Antonio Cangiano

Antonio Cangiano — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 12:26:14 +0000

@Scott: That’s not really the case any longer. As of 9.5, you have 128 characters for the name of the table and 128 characters for the name of the schema. A table can therefore be identified by up to 256 characters. That’s more than most reasonable people would ever use.

@Humberto: DB2 is a commercial database. DB2 Express-C is free “as in beer” and therefore not open source software. The drivers for Ruby, Python, PHP and Perl are all open source though.

@Zkurven: Quoting from the book Understanding DB2:

“In 1996, IBM announced DB2 UDB Version 5 for distributed platforms. With this version, DB2 was able to store all kinds of electronic data, including traditional relational data, as well as audio, video, and text documents. It was the first version optimized for the Web, and it supported a range of distributed platforms&8212;for example, OS/2, Windows, AIX, HP-UX, and Solaris&8212;from multiple vendors. Moreover, this universal database was able to run on a variety of hardware, from uniprocessor systems and symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) systems to massively parallel processing (MPP) systems and clusters of SMP systems. IBM included the term “Universal” in the name to represent the new capabilities of this version.”.

It could also take advantage of fast protocols to enable the communication between nodes of a physically partitioned databases. So at the time it was a really big deal.

By: Darren Skinner

Darren Skinner — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 12:05:06 +0000

@Scott

The limit for tables has been 128 characters since at least version 8.

Some objects such as indexes and sprocs were limited to 18, but this limit increased to 128 a while ago.

On the whole, V9.7 is looking very good indeed. specifically compressed indexes and the option of not having global indexes on range partitioned tables.

By: Zkurvena Prace

Zkurvena Prace — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 09:58:16 +0000

What was revolutionary feature in DB2 UDB V5?

By: Humberto Massa

Humberto Massa — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 09:27:18 +0000

This is great news. There isn’t any Free Software version of DB2, is there?

By: Scott Southerland

Scott Southerland — Thu, 23 Apr 2009 08:00:08 +0000

DB2 is terrible. Your table names can only be a few (10 or 12 i think) characters long and this gets to be a problem, it becomes impossible to find anything. I’ll stick with something that let’s me name my stuff what I want to.