IBM Plans DB2-Based Information Integrator

IBM

The latter DB2-based product, code-named Xperanto, will offer full text searches, Xquery support and will be a natural evolution of DB2 as the basis for IBM's plan to make all information-relational and nonrelational,searchable. Xquery is the query language being proposed as the standard way to query XML data.

"Information integration is where Janet [Perna is taking this business,80 percent of data is nonrelational," said Nelson Mattos, an IBM distinguished engineer and director of information integration for IBM's Data Management Group. Perna is general manager of that group.

IBM, like database rivals Microsoft and Oracle, is rushing to add more native XML capabilities to what has been a relational database. The current DB2 Release 7.2 can store and manage XML data,data found on the Web. XML format, unlike SQL, comes wrapped with all sorts of meta data to help identify it.

Later this month, IBM will preview Xquery accessing Web services within DB2, said Mattos.

That capability would enable nontraditional clients,properly enabled cell phones and PDAs, for example,to access that data and retrieve realtime stock quotes via Web services, he said.

IBM will make SQL, XML, stored procedures, "all the assets" of DB2 available to the Web services environment and also make DB2 a consumer of those services, Mattos said.

Web services is a big thrust for IBM,and the rest of the computer industry. BEA Systems outlined its Web services game plan last week. Microsoft is pushing its .Net technologies and methodologies as a way to build and maintain such services. IBM has joined forces with rival Microsoft in evangelizing the need for myriad Web standards to ensure interoperability between vendor offerings. Web services will never meet its potential if vendors fragment their services, analysts said.

IBM is clearly in the Java and Java 2, Enterprise Edition camp, but will interoperate with services built with Microsoft's competing .Net technologies. "We'll cooperate [with Microsoft on the standards and compete on the implementation," said Scott Hebner, director of marketing for IBM WebSphere.

IBM plans to spend more than $700 million in Web services investments and "another few million in marketing and support," said John Swainson, general manager of IBM's Application and Integration Middleware Division. Acknowledging that Web services have been hyped, Swainson and other IBM executives still maintain that this is where the future lies. "This is not necessarily a new idea. It's [an accepted way to represent the interface ... an old idea that goes back to CORBA and maybe back to DCE," Swainson said.

But the fact that customers, integrators and users have rallied around standards like XML, SOAP, UDDI and WSDL means that a cross-vendor, cross-platform way to implement Web services is at hand, many observers said.

In an interview with CRN, Steve Mills, senior vice president and group executive of IBM Software, said adoption of Web services could boost integrator productivity. "Forty percent of all IT [spending is integration work, and that's largely labor and not product. ... The promise of XML, Web services is to displace labor and accelerate product engagements. Maybe an integrator can do four, six, 10 projects instead of two per year," he said.