DB2 Version 8 Boasts Management Edge

Specifically, IBM plans to announce an open beta for Linux, Windows 2000, HP-UX, Solaris and AIX, sources said. The company has said the beta will happen this summer and the final product will ship this year. The current DB2 7.2 release has been available since last summer.

DB2 VERSION 8 FEATURES

>> Configuration advisor for automatic hardware detection
>> Multidimensional clustering
>> Online table reorg
>> Online index reorg
>> Online buffer pool management
>> Automatic XML schema validation
>> Automatic XML transformation (via XSLT)

DB2 Release 8 is more robust than the current version, observers said. "The focus [of the new version is online utilities and tools [and the ability to change memory management online and do online index rebuilds," said Mark Shainman, senior analyst at Meta Group.

Compared to Oracle, "which has a cloud of third-party" management and monitoring products, IBM needed to bolster its DBA toolset, said Carl Olofson, analyst at IDC.

"The self-healing stuff is big," said John Dubois, CTO at database specialist Cutting Edge Strategies, San Francisco. "It makes administrators very happy and [that trickles down to end users," he said.

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"Microsoft upped the bar in SQL Server 2000 with self-tuning [and self-optimization," said Chris Koontz, a consultant at Core-Techs, Greensboro, N.C. "I think IBM is trying to equal and maybe even leapfrog that."

While IBM Software would not comment on this week's news, executives have long outlined plans to make DB2 more self-healing, self-tuning and self-maintaining. Last May, Janet Perna, general manager of IBM's data management group, called the upcoming DB2 update the "most significant release in a decade."

IBM also is working on its data integration server, code-named Xperanto and a cornerstone of the vendor's federated data game plan.

IBM likes to contrast that strategy,under which data can reside anywhere and DB2 acts as a traffic cop/mediator to seek it out, retrieve it, parse it and present it,to Oracle's world view, in which all data must reside in Oracle's own databases.

Xperanto will add support for Xquery, the proposed standard query language for XML data.