IBM: Next DB2 To Ship In November

IBM

DB2 version 8, which has been in beta since late July, features more self-tuning and self-management to keep the database tuned and running as automatically as possible, said Paul Rivot, director of database server and business intelligence at IBM Software.

The database's new Health Center feature, for example, sends out pages to handhelds or other devices with alerts about database issues and recommended courses of action. Multidimensional clustering capability will let users create a database and store it on disk in WYSIWYG mode, displaying customers by geography or by product sold, for example. The WYSIWYG mode can speed the performance of business-intelligence applications, Rivot said.

The corporate database market is a hotly contested three-way race between IBM, Oracle and Microsoft. IBM also repackaged its database and will now offer an enterprise server edition for $25,000 per CPU before discounts. The company previously offered an enterprise edition for $20,000 per CPU and an enterprise edition extended for $25,000 per CPU.

Customers that want extended clustering capability can add that support for an additional $7,500 per CPU, although Rivot said he thinks the new enterprise server edition will cover 90 percent of most corporate needs.

For SMBs and departments within large organizations, a workgroup edition that had been $14,000 with the previous version of DB2 will now be $7,500 per CPU. For companies that would rather go with per-user pricing, the database will cost $969 per server plus $249 per user.