IBM continues to dole out tidbits about its next DB2 database, aka Viper.
Today the company made available a free early version for customers and partners. It was unclear how this "test drive" differs from a previous beta release offered in November.
As with virtually every new tech product, IBM is slapping the "SOA" label on Viper. SOAs or Service Oriented Architectures, are the latest technological cure-all capturing the imagination and marketing dollars of vendors.
New features include DB2 Label Based Access Control (LBAC) security that lets users apply a new column-level labeling to set access to sensitive data, in addition to current row-level access control.
Ambuj Goyal, IBM's GM for Information Management outlined some new features at IBM's Executive SOA Summit in Jaipur, India, the company said.
IBM has talked up the release for more than a year, promising it will handle both relational and non-relational XML data natively. The product is due mid-year.
Interestingly, all three of the major database vendors already claim full XML support in their offerings .
In an interview Wednesday, an Oracle exec took exception to a question about Oracle's own handling of XML in the database.
"How we store XML on the database is, excuse me, none of your business. The point is you can write an app using XML standards," said Mark Drake, manager of product management for XML technology for the Redwood Shores, Calif. vendor.
"Whether we shred it, parse it, it doesn't matter. There is no such thing as a native XML storage model, there is no W3c standard or 11th stone tablet, telling us how," he noted.
