New DB2, Shipping Now, Promises Performance, Self-Healing Gains

For this release, the company has focused on beefing up self-tuning and monitoring talents and integrating more business intelligence into the core database, said Paul Rivot, director of database server and business intelligence at IBM Software.

One design goal was faster query performance on multidimensional clusters to enable customers to do heavy-duty transaction processing and analytic queries on the same database rather than offloading the latter workload to an expensive data warehouse. Rivot said IBM has met that goal, cutting the time it takes to do business intelligence queries by 90 percent on average compared with the previous release.

Microsoft maintains that Oracle and IBM are playing catch-up in terms of integrated business intelligence.

IBM also wanted this version to be easier to install and manage than Oracle databases.

John Schwartz, vice president of business development at Noospherics, a Reisterstown, Md., integrator, said IBM's progress in self-healing has been significant.

"When you deploy complex J2EE applications across multiple servers, this self-healing, self-management thing is a big boost. They've pretty much taken the database [tuning out of the equation, cutting time there by one-third," Schwartz said.

IBM's aggressive financing moves have also made a difference, he noted. Customers are bullish on the deferred payment, low-interest credit play IBM launched last month (See related story.

As previously reported, IBM has realigned database pricing, combining what had been two enterprise versions into one, now costing $7,500 per CPU vs. $15,000 per CPU. At the low end, it is offering a $1,000 version for small businesses. In SMB, IBM is positioning DB2 Express to take on Microsoft SQL Server.